4 November 2024 ~ Kaliningrad flea market has moved to a new location
The Kaliningrad flea market that has occupied the pavement area close to the Central Market, and in more recent years spilled over onto a ribbon of disused ground bordering the moat of the Wrangel Tower, has officially moved.
For me, as I dare say for many, the relocation of this sprawling and excitingly chaotic masterpiece of antiques, collectables, curios and junk, marks the end of an era. Not that we did not know that it was coming; plans to move the market on have been in the pipeline for years. Indeed, I wrote about the proposal in a 2022 blog post: What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyer’s Paradise?
Kaliningrad flea market moves to a new location
We all know that nothing stays the same forever; Königsberg can testify to that. Nevertheless, knowing that change is imminent rarely compensates when it comes to pass.
There will be some, of course, who will breath a sigh of relief that most days, but on a Saturday in particular, they will at last be able to stroll without let or hindrance along the sidewalk next to the Wrangel Tower instead of running a zigzag gauntlet through sandwiched lines of dealers’ stalls agog with curious clutter-buggers.
I, for one, however, will miss the incipient urge whenever I visit the city’s Central Market (food market) to detour to the ‘junk’ stalls to see what they have on offer that I cannot live without, such as an old tin bucket, for example.
There have been occasions when travelling by bus on route to somewhere else that I have accidentally alighted at the flea market. Of course, I have only gone to look, not to buy. So imagine how surprised I have been on arriving home to discover that whilst I was only looking a Soviet belt, a Königsberg ashtray, a kitsch ornament and an old German helmet have somehow jumped into my shopping bag.
Kaliningrad flea market has moved
I have not yet had the chance to work out which bus route one should take to get to the market’s new location. Gaidara Street 8 is its new address; a piece of land, I am told, that lies opposite the bridge on the way to Sovetsky Prospekt.
At the time of writing (4 November 2024), the market is not yet functioning. By all accounts, the site is vast, but a great deal needs to be done to bring it up to snuff, to make it seller- and buyer-friendly. News is, however, according to the market organisers, that the site will be ready and the market up and running in a matter of days not weeks.
Now, where did I put my Kaliningrad map? What have I done with my bucket?
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: 387 Osobaya Varka
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
31 October 2024 ~ 387 Osobaya Varka beer in Kaliningrad good or not?
Have you ever wondered why Baltika Breweries number their beers instead of giving them a name, for example Russian Sausage or Yalkee Palki. I read somewhere that it is a hangback to Soviet times when everything was numbered, ie School No. 26, Bakery No. 38, Factory No. 97, but perhaps the real reason Baltika use a number instead of a name is that it is easier to recall. Also, whenever one asks for one of their numerical brands, they have first to refer to the brewery name. I mean you can hardly ask for a ‘9’, can you, without running the risk of buying a pair of 9-sized slippers, or a packet containing a German negative. Nine, I mean no; when you ask for any Baltika beer with a number instead of a name, you have to append the ‘Baltika’ first, and, from a marketing point of view, this is rather clever.
Disregarding the fact that not many people ask for bottles of beer when they take them off the shelf (No theory is perfect!), Baltika may have smugly thought that they had the numbers game sewn up … and they had, until along came this little beauty: a beer that goes by the name of 365, sorry that’s a phone number of an old flame (Old Flame Bitter! That’s a good name for a beer!) I meant to say 387.
387 Osobaya Varka beer
387 (never start a sentence with a number!). Is it a bus? Is it a car? Is it a plane? No, the answer to the riddle lies, as revealed by Svoe Mnenie Branding Agency’s comment on the website packagingoftheworld.com, that this Russian brew was not named after Tyre Repair Centre No. 387, but because of 387’s vital statistics. According to what I have read, each bottle of 387 contains three types of malt – lager, caramel and burnt; it has taken eight hours to brew; and not less than seven days of natural fermentation. Put it together and what have you got? 387. Now that’s rather clever too, is it not!
More clever is the fact that the figures ‘387’ all but completely overwhelm the label and are produced in a clear, strong, attractive typeface with closed counters, thus ensuring that the beer leaps out at you from the multiplicity of brands seeking attention on any one shelf.
The little image of the Kaluga brewery projected in a contrasting orange colour on the collar label is also a nice, effective visual touch.
Heckler: “’ere mate, did you buy this [beep] beer to look at the label or to drink the [beep]?!”
We’ll have less of that, my good man! I thought we said no liberals?
When I first bought and drank this beer on 12 September 2022, it cost me 79 roubles. The average price today for a 0.45 litre bottle would appear to be around 80 to 84 roubles. Can’t complain about that.
Beer 387 Osobaya Varka, to use its full name, weighs in at 6.8 per cent. For an old Englishman like me who is used to drinking beer at strengths between 4.1 and 4.5, that’s quite a hike, but who is complaining? Live dangerously. It’s safer than walking down many a street in London once the night has mugged the day.
As always (“He’s so [beep] predictable!” It’s that [beep] heckler again!), the assessment of a good beer and, indeed a bad beer, starts with hooter appraisal. Tops away and the smell genie that pops out of the bottle is strong, sweet and barley-like, with jostling hoppy undertones. The aroma is not lost between the bottle and the glass, into which the nectar happily settles to give a good mid-amber colour and a head which is ‘now you see it and now you don’t’.
The head fizzling out faster than a TARDIS escaping from Dover [see episode 28,000 of Dr Woke ‘The Invasion of the Third Worlders’] is as significant to me as paying my TV licence. I don’t want to have to shave every time I drink a beer. I don’t get the taste and high-volume foam connection, if, indeed, there is one.
Here we have a mid-hoppy taste; a malty taste; a little bit of fruity taste; culminating in a taste that owns up to its strength. The first sip loses nothing in the making, and there is a nice balance among the flavours. The finish is a ‘back of the tongue’ gripper, and the aftertaste in no hurry to let you down and scarper.
The beer is moreish, which is good news for the brewers and also for you, providing you weren’t so daft as to only buy one bottle!
Patric McGoohan’s Prisoner said, “I am not a number, I’m a free man!”
Beer 387 is a number. It is not a free beer, but, believe you me, it’s worth every rouble.
“AB InBev Efes is currently the biggest player on the beer market in Russia” AB InBev Efes
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: 387 Osobaya Varka Brewer: AB InBev Efes Where it is brewed: Russia Bottle capacity: 0.45 litre Strength: 6.8% Price: It cost me 79 roubles (0.63p) Appearance: Light amber Aroma: Barley with fruit nuances Taste: Starts mild-hop bitter; Finishes with a bite Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Unique Would you buy it again? There’s no reason not to
A brilliant beer with rich and original flavour. Caramel malt gives a rich colour, whereas brown malt adds a rye bread aftertaste. This light beer is slightly stronger than average, which makes its flavour more complex and pronounced.
Wot other’s say [Comments on 387 Osobaya Varka from the internet, unedited] 😊Excellent beer, for lovers of strong foamy drinks, good quality, easy to drink, no alcohol aftertaste! [Comment: No idea where he got the ‘foamy’ from!] 😊Yes, I have been enjoying this beer for a long time. It goes well with pistachios. It is cold and just right in the heat. Not weak and not strong… 😑 The taste is flat a bit sweet, a bit sour with faint malty finish. Too much carbonation along with alcohol make very bad mouthfeel. Really needs some food pairing. Avoid it. [Comment: A bit bitty. Avoid bit.] 😊I forget what it tastes like, but I know I enjoyed it!
22 September 2024 ~ Spare Some Change Makes Beggars out of All of Us
Have you ever noticed that when you go away for a few weeks, on your return not everything has changed, but some things have and subtly. For example, after my recent sojourn in the UK, I returned to Kaliningrad to find that the vacuum cleaner appliances had strangely disappeared, that someone had half-inched the mat from my office/study/drinking den, that the water jug had vanished, that a small table was where it wasn’t, and that the cat’s bowls had turned from plastic to ceramic. On a not so subtle and more depressing note, I learnt that the neighbour’s cat ~ I used to call her ‘Big Eyes’ ~ had scaled her last plank backwards. She used this technique to descend from a flat roof on the second storey of her owner’s house after her owners cut down the birch tree along whose branches she used to scramble.
Unlike our stay-at-home Ginger, she was an out-and-about sort of cat, a brave and intrepid adventurer, who, alas, was to put too much faith in the mythical tale that cats have nine lives and met with the truth abruptly whilst she was crossing the road.
The old philosophical question is there life after death is problematic enough without appending to that question are cats accorded a similar privilege?
“Of course, cat heaven exists,” cat lovers cry indignantly, but does it follow from this assumption that parity heavens exist for pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and every other animal species that are brought into this world merely to be slaughtered for the tastebud pleasures of carnivores?
Abstractions of this nature, though they may well have once occurred to me in some distant, cynical, cerebral past, found no room in my consciousness on returning to Kaliningrad, for soon I would be fretting about an entirely different dilemma ~ is there life after YouTube?
In the short while I had been away not only had my rug gone west but also YouTube with it, or to be more precise, had thereto been confined. “That’s buggered it,” I thought ~ I am prone to moments of eloquence like this ~ for though I could not give a monkey’s for the loss of Western mainstream media, where would I go with YouTube gone for my daily fix of music, for documentaries of an historical nature and for classic pre-woke TV dramas like 1960s’ Dangerman, filmed in glorious black and white when the use of the term black and white was not endowed with racial undertones and even if it had been nobody British at that time would have given a monkey’s f.ck. Ah, Happy Days indeed!
Sixty minutes searching Google for credible alternatives to the sort of content with which I engage on YouTube was enough to reassure me that whilst life without YouTube was not as we know it ~ YouTube is but one place in the internet’s vast and expanding universe but in itself it seems infinite ~ life without it was not unsupportable.
I found a site I had used in the past which offered a reasonably good selection of archived TV dramas and classic black and white films, and I also upturned a second site which, although containing the sort of stuff I would not touch with a barge polack ~ modern, glossy, tacky and geared to a left-leaning audience ~ tendered the consolation of half a dozen history programmes of a fairly reputable nature.
I was conscious that I was doing something that the so-called entitled millennials are only just coming to terms with in these rapidly changing times: I was having to ‘make do’. The derivation actually precedes the generation to which I belong. It has its origins in wartime slogans, and was born out of the real necessity of making the best of a bad situation, using whatever scant resources were at hand. Making do in the age of misinformation/disinformation, the cast offs and the hand me downs of second- and third-best websites represent a collateral revision of the quid pro quo arrangement of if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine, rehashed by modern politics as so long as you let me show you mine then I’ll let you show me yours.
I sometimes wonder if any of our contemporary politicians have bothered to read Gulliver’s Travels,written and published by Jonathan Swift in 1726, and if the answer is yes, did they find it illuminating. I for one believe that Swift’s seminal work should be made mandatory reading for anyone who is contemplating taking up a career in politics.
Ping Pong You’re Not Wrong
Ping pong, aka table tennis, is a game like many other games, such as cricket, rugby, tennis and football, I can honestly say I have never much cared for. I don’t care much for the tit for tat and the way in which the ball, be it big or small, gets passed back and forth with monotonous regularity between two opposing but rules-based players or carefully hand-picked teams, with no apparent benefit to anyone else outside of the game, give or take a cheer or two, which quickly fade in euphoria’s twilight.
Above: Ping and Pong. It’s batty.
At least in the UK when the sad illusion Democracy has been stripped down naked like the tired old whore she is, which many, out of trained submission or a sense of misplaced respect, shy away from doing, the rules of the game, whose they are and who it is that benefits from them are as transparent as a Nylon negligee (What happened to that in my absence?). Thanks to long experience of the electoral system’s hocus pocus, the who will it be first past the post, we know that whether we make our mark or not, we are guaranteed for the next five years to be saddled with one or the other bunch of ineffectual dunderheads and that, give or take a nuance or two, whichever party claims Number 10 as its prize will be singing, rather badly as usual, from the communal globalist hymn sheet: Money, Money, Money. Please to sing along now. You are all familiar with the refrain.
During my last assignment in the UK, I was treated to the spectacle of this perfectly meaningless political role play, the changing of the old guard ~ ping pong, ping pong … pong, pong, pong. Out with the old and in with the old: the Tories on their way out, Labour on their way in, but significantly rather more out than in and with many of them clearly quite out of it. Bring on the men in white coats. (Sorry I did not mention women; I’m taking a course in misogyny.)
This rotational, completely predictable, seesaw-moment momentum has less to do with change than it does with continuity, as most of the Tories’ acclaimed centre right are so way left of centre that they ought to be in the Labour Party, as many of them effectively are, whilst the Labour party itself knows no longer what it is, what it wants to be and least of all where it is going. Shame it is taking the nation with it. Half of Labour is hard left, half of it is half hearted and the other half is clearly insane (and clearly possess a triple ‘A’ in Maths). Neither Labour or the Cons ever recovered from Tony Blair. Both exhibit incurable symptoms, and the plague they exhale collusively is addling minds and destroying the country.
Nowhere is this emergency better illustrated than when the media cries exultantly that one or other of the old two parties has ‘won it by a landslide’.
The only landslide the public sense is that things are slipping away from them, that things are going from bad to worse. And yet as catastrophic as British life now is, many in the UK are yet to grasp the intelligence that by hook or by crook the old two parties need to be put out to grass. Change is as good as a rest, as they say, and a rest from them is badly needed and, more to the point, excessively overdue.
Above: I think it’s self-explanatory …
To be fair, if that is the same as being honest, Liebour did in its accession usher in some changes, albeit typically hurriedly, typically without much thought and typically in the process breaking most if not at all of its pre-election promises. But as the changes so far instituted are typically Labour in character, they have in the absolute sense changed very little at all. For example, if a Labour government did not raise taxes what a momentous change that would be. But then if Labour did not raise taxes would anybody know they were there?
Whoever it was who thought to dub Labour the party of taxation was a percipient man indeed, so much more than just perspicacious that the chances of him being a woman are nil (Excuse me for being sexist, you see I’m taking this course in misogyny.). But don’t you dare complain, not about being a man when you would rather you were a woman (it’s something you cannot change) and don’t complain about Labour’s tax hikes. You were warned that Liebour would tax you, and tax you into the ground, so why did you vote them in!
It is a fact of life that some things change and some things plainly don’t (Come on now transvestites, don’t get those knickers into a twist!); some things change a lot and others don’t change that much; some things get done for a change, and just for a change some things don’t; and there’s not a lot of change to be had out of six quid for a pint. But there are some things that will never change, though given time they probably will, but by the time they do will it be too late? Let’s talk immigration. Somebody ought to, has to, as it should be abundantly clear by now that that somebody is not Starmer.
Immigration is possibly the one issue that leading up to the General Election the Liebour party did not lie about; perhaps they simply forgot. Those of us who did not vote Labour were right, not far-right mind you, but right that we did not do so, if only for this reason, since with depressing predictability Labour has not done, and has no intention of ever doing, as much as diddly squit to resolve the immigration crisis, a dastardly weaponisation programme which represents the one real threat to the stability of the British nation and the safety of its indigenous people.
Where Labour has excelled itself is channelling more resources into the conflict in Ukraine at a time when we need to squander it least on globalist-led agendas. Do you ever ask yourself what it is that they do with your money which they take in the name of ‘council tax’? Could it be used to foot the bill for conflicts in which we have no legitimate role, even if we started them, and for paving the way for dinghy migrants to live it up in luxury?
Immigration has changed and also it has not. It has not changed in that we still have it, has not changed in that we don’t want it, but has changed inasmuch that want it or want it not, there is a lot more of it than there used to be. Central to this change is that the major EU powers no longer deem it necessary to conceal their complicit role in organising and facilitating the migrant invasion of Britain.
The infectiousness of this invasion is far more virulent and far more lethal than any contrived plandemic could be. Perhaps we should call on dear old Bill. Come on Bill, old boy, whip us up a jab or six to provide the British people with the immunity they so desperately need to protect themselves from Coronomigrant. Violent crime is rampant, acts of terrorism sweep the nation, the police are no longer a force but a branch of the social services and the government is so dismally limp it is crying out for a shot of moral Viagra.
White fight not far right
One thing that was markedly different during recent months in England, which was not necessarily good but understandably necessary as an alternative stay of civil war, was that when the riots came, as come they did and come they will, it was the whiteys on the war path. Now that did make a change!!!
It was no change at Notting Hill Carnival. Yet again it proved to be London’s annual ethnic stab fest. Any other event with a history resembling the mind of an on-the-rampage serial killer would have been banned years ago, as would the Notting Hill Carnival if it was anything other than black. It is patently inconceivable that a white British festival with a similar record of bloodlust would be allowed to continue year on year. Murder or no murder, it would have been denounced from the outset as unfit for ethnic consumption and that without equivocation would have rapidly been the end of that. This year’s Boot Hill incident cost two more people their lives, adding to the festival’s ever increasing death toll. Meanwhile, the Labour government is contemplating doubling down on the British tradition of fox hunting. It seems that rural blood sports must be banned whilst urban ones are tolerated, encouraged one might say. Brrr! it felt as if something just walked over the United Kingdom’s grave. Could that something be two-tier policing?
Over to our new prime minister. He may resemble a disciplinarian, a 1950s’ schoolmaster parachuted strategically in from a time when Britain was really Britain, but as far as ethnics are concerned looks can be deceiving. Did he give the carnival organisers the six of the best he gave the white rioters? Did he give them lines to write, “Thou shalt not stab at the Notting Hill Carnival”? Did he heck as like. He caned himself instead, by forgetting the lines of condemnation the public were waiting to hear from him, either that or the savage events and the fear of being called racist deprived him of his left-wing backbone and left him morally speechless. He eventually did cough something up, but before you could say one rule for them and a different rule for us, and before some impudent scallywag could raise the uncomfortable spectre of policing on a two-tier level, he was banging the same old distraction drum about the number one priority being the need to protect society from the heinous actions of right-wing thugs. As for random knife attacks by men whose names we can’t pronounce and acts of organised terrorism by medieval hostiles (I’ve just had a call from my stockbroker ~ invest in inflatable dinghies), the message from Britain’s political elite is as masters of the hen house they have every right to fill it with as many foreign foxes as the ECHR permits, so just sit back and enjoy your fate.
I began this post from the perspective of change and seem to have moved mesmerically into the realm where déjà vu governs the laws of momentum, and yet not everything in the world is as predictable as we would like to think. Those who live in a certain street in Kaliningrad thought they would never see the day when they would get themselves a brand-new pavement, but that day eventually dawned, despite one woman tutting, “It’s taken thirty years!” and now that vital change for which we had all been waiting seems as though it was always thus, that the pavement has always been there.
The same could be said of a certain sub-post office in a certain UK shire town. The post office seems to have been there for as long as memory itself, and mine is quite a long one, but it’s ‘all change’ when you scratch the surface. I am sure that this has got nothing to do with the fact it is run by Asians ~ which British post office isn’t! ~ but everything to do with the erratic hours it keeps. It is the first post office I have ever encountered that opens when it likes, making it an excellent venue whenever you catch it right, because since nobody trusts its opening hours very few people use it, hence the absence of queues. Not having to stand in line makes such a welcome change from a trip to your average post office, where you need to go armed with a sleeping bag and enough provisions to last you a fortnight, and yet it is such an odd phenomenon that it has you asking the question, could this peculiar post office that is more often shut than not, in fact be a front for something else? Like all these foreign food stores that pop up overnight and the multitude of barber’s shops purporting to be Turkish when the owners and all who work in them look and talk Albanian. Perhaps the owners of these businesses are engaged in some other activity, such as laundering, for example. There’s no hard left sign visible outside the coven of Hope Not Hate, but just because you cannot see the twin tubs does not mean that they are not there and the country is not being rinsed.
Whilst every street in every town and every city in England have fallen forfeit to immigration (you may have heard the phrase ‘Our cities have changed beyond recognition’), the streets of Russian Kaliningrad have decidedly changed for the better, that is to say materially and, with the restitution of law and order and regaining of self-respect, which had been partly laid to waste as a repercussion of perestroika, in matters of social decorum.
Whenever I walk the perimeters of Königsberg’s ancient ponds, this variance in urban life does not leap up and out at me like something dark on a no-go street in Peckham but is inviting enough to assail my senses with what we have lost in Britain. The contrast in the cultural climates is visible, audible, palpable, and it starts with the way in which people dress.
From New York to the South Pole, almost everybody these days is hardwired to dressing casual. I suspect that I am one of the few remaining sartorial standard bearers who espouses cravat, frock coat and top hat ~ not forgetting silver-topped cane ~ rather than wear a pair of trainers.
Above: “I don’t as a rule wear any, but I always make sure not to go out with, or in, a strong wind”
Kaliningradians and Kaliningrad visitors from other parts of Russia tend to follow a smart-casual trend. Whereas, as in every other sphere of cultural life, dress code in the UK has taken a turn for the worse and worst, going from ultra-smart to smart-casual, to trendy casual, to half casual, to dumb-down casual to bags of shit.
Who is not acquainted with that funny old Asian man? Let me point him out to you: that’s him there, there, there, over there and over here … See how he wears all sorts of oddments, everything thrown together: the workshop apron, pantaloon trousers, corny ill-fitting jacket bought from yonder charity shop and, of course, a pair of iridescent trainers ~ what lovely colour combinations, orange, yellow and purple. And he is indisputably the best dressed man in Bedford.
Now turn around and cast your gaze on those beautiful English ladies amorphously squashed in over-tight leggings, all bums and large tums, with cattle rings through their noses, shrapnel embedded in brows and lips and covered in head to foot with tats. Isn’t their language colourful: f*ck, f*ck, f*ck. And what is that pervasive smell, no not that smell, this smell! Pooh! It is the town centre gently marinating in the stench of stale and smoking Ganja. Look up, it’s a live one, and he’s heading in our direction! Time to take evasive action! Cross to the opposite side of the street and quick!
The fundamental difference between Britain’s streets and the streets of Kaliningrad is not confined to sartorial consciousness: manners maketh man (they seem not to maketh UK women). Public behaviour on Kaliningrad’s streets, give or take the inevitable exception, is generally better than it is England. And, with the Russian accent on family values, traditional family groups of traditional Russian heritage freely and with confidence enjoy the streets of their city. Contrast homely scenes like this with the kind of groups you can expect to find, and more’s the pity do, hanging around in England’s cities and degrading its small-town centres.
Lefties would have us believe that the gangs of blacks and Asians, and the johnny-come-lately tribes flooding in on the promise tide of benefits, rights and endless freebies from far-flung parts of the world’s subcontinent are an enriching sight for monocultural eyes. But such postulations are unconvincing even through their glasses. Excelling the attitude and behavioural problems evinced by their white ne’er-do-well counterparts, a pervasive air of ‘up to no good’ hangs above the Ganja cloud and fills the vacuum on Britain’s streets left by the absence of coppers with an ‘at any moment it could all kick off’ incertitude. Menace and apprehension rule. Britain’s streets are not just uncouth, they are gravely infected with passive aggression.
Yes, things have certainly changed from the Britain I once knew and loved. I wonder what the Victorians and Edwardians would make of it. I wonder what those who fought for their country and died in two world wars would make of it. What would Sir Winston Churchill say? We know what Enoch Powell would say, since he said it back in the 1960s. Lord, if only someone had listened to him!
Spare some change, please!
I read somewhere (please tell me that this is not true) that housebreakers in the UK do not qualify for prison sentences until they have been convicted of 26 successive accounts of burglary. It is an indisputable fact that you have got more chance of winning the lottery or stopping the boats at Dover than getting arrested for shoplifting. It’s take your pick skanky ladies and nothing resembling gentlemen, you’ve really nothing to lose. In the unlikely event you get caught in the act, just give the merchandise back and have it away from the shop next door. Nice one, mate: Ha! Ha! Ha! Easy-touch-Britain, innit!
I have no idea if shoplifting is as prevalent in Kaliningrad as it is in every British town and city. I somehow feel it is not. But I do know, as I have witnessed it personally, that Kaliningrad has a boy-racer problem and that those that race are not all boys. Thankfully, however, one of the more applaudable changes has been the city-wide installation of efficacious pedestrian crossings. Gone are the days when we used to huddle in groups of five or more on the opposite sides of the four-lane roads and then, on the count of 10, make a nervous dash for it. Oh, how the drama of youth gives way to prudence in later life!
If someone was to ask me, and I don’t suppose they will, what is the one thing you would like to see changed in Kaliningrad, the answer without a second thought would be the introduction of a law to stamp out dugs that bark incessantly or, better still, to penalise their owners. These must-be mutton-jeff mut-lovers can never have heard of noise pollution, possibly because like the rest of us, they can hear precious little above the row that their barking dugs are making. It’s a dugs life, as someone said, someone who couldn’t spell dogs correctly.
Since the subject of this post is change, I expect that you expect that at some point in the narrative, at this point, for example, the temptation to make some corny remark about change in relation to underpants would finally prove too much for me, but I hate to disappoint you that I am about to disappoint you, because someone might pull them up on me, I mean pull me up on it, and I do not intend to stoop so low, so let’s instead be briefs.
Ringing the changes is happening in a negative way on the Polish border. Always slow and unhelpful, the Polish border authorities are excelling their own track record for putting obstacles in one’s way where none should be encountered, thus holding up one’s journey as though suspending it in empty space by a very strong pair of invisible braces (we’re suspiciously close to pants again!). The object of the exercise appears to be none other than to subject the weary traveller to the torment of terminal boredom or failing in that ambition to simply delay one long enough to make one miss one’s flight. If you have been an unhappy recipient of this apparent change in policy and believe you are being short-changed by conditions of an adverse nature at the Russian-Polish border, here is where you can lodge your complaint:
I was going to finish this post on change by saying something profound, like ‘things change and that’s a fact, and very often not for the better’. And then it suddenly occurred to me that women in leopard print tights rarely change their spots. So, then I revised my ending to read, ‘if it don’t change it will stay the same’, but whilst I know it will not change anything, I went and changed my mind.
Beggar: <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/homeless-man-sitting-ground-flat-vector-illustration-desperate-hungry-poor-male-person-sitting-street-near-trash-bin-asking-help-getting-into-financial-trouble-poverty-concept_24644540.htm/#query=street beggar&position=0&from_view=keyword&track=ais_hybrid&uuid=af6b8f40-80ae-4929-ae9a-94b805e40e71″">Image by pch.vector</a> on Freepik
What is it about coach-based tours that have long been unappealing to me? And, if I faithfully eschewed them in the UK, why would I volunteer to go on one, here, in Kaliningrad? Well, I certainly had the means, the motive and the opportunity: at 15 quid I could just about afford it; I want to visit as many interesting places in the Kaliningrad region as I can; and we had a bus to go on. Nothing ventured, nothing gained!
“You’ll probably be the only man on the bus,” opined my wife. According to her, Russian women are predominantly more interested in matters of culture, art and history than Russian men. Ooh, that’s so sexist!
Well, she was wrong. There were three males on the coach, including myself, and one of them was the bus driver. I wonder what he was doing on this trip?
As with many events that are organised for me, I did not know where we were going or what we were going to see. I had been told that one stop on the way to Wherever It Was would be a cheese factory. I was rather looking forward to that. It’s a pity it never happened. However we did stop at two towns, two settlements, visited two museums and ate in an unconventional restaurant.
The job of the by-bus tour guide is very much a vocal one, and no sooner had the driver started the engine and put the bus in gear than the guide was giving us a dose of the verbals. She spoke too fast for me to catch everything she said, but I got the gist and where the gist escaped me, Olga brought me up to speed.
The first place where we came to rest was ‘The Big Meat Pie’. I don’t suppose for a moment that this is its real name, but I christened it that in the summer of 21, when we paused here for refreshments on route to Angel Park.
You would never have guessed it from the effigy of a big meat pie proudly rotating on top of a pole some forty feet above the carpark that this place is genuinely held in awe by lovers of big meat pies.
I am not sure whether anybody from our group partook of these exquisite delicacies, which look like giant turnovers, but I do know that there was a veritable stampede for the public incoveniences, which, located inside the premises, are one of those annoying places where to pee or to poo comes at a price.
Whenever I travel anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, I deliberately cut down on my fluid intake and was glad that I had today, because the toilet queue was rammed and the access gate unmanned, in other words it was coins or card. I can just imagine how happy folk would have been standing there with bursting bladders should a silly old fart of an Englishman jam the gate with the wrong coins or fail to use his card correctly.
There was another option: Outside in the carpark stood two of those little green Portaloos. I don’t like these, do you? No matter where you find them in the universe, more often than not they are stink-ridden, lack essential supplies for the paperwork and have, that is when they do have them, hand-gel sanitisers that have not seen gel since dinosaurs ruled the Earth. (Come back dinosaurs, we now have globalists!)
As in all the best sitcom films of the 1970s (Carry Ons and On The Buses etc), having peed or not, having stuffed a gigantic meat pie down our gullets or not, we all at a given moment filed back onto the bus and went roaring off in unison ~ destination, a town called Gusev.
A town called Gusev
Our bus drew to a halt in front of a large, ornate and, although I say so myself, impressive-looking Orthodox church domineering a vast piazza (no, that’s a pizza you are thinking of), which, before it underwent the modernisation of multicoloured block paving, substantial shrub and flower planters, street lamps of a retro nature and benches to watch the world go by on, would have been, I am sure, a large chunk of bland concrete on which the Soviets held parades and where its dignitaries and officials would have addressed the proletariat. If that was the sort of place it was, it was not that sort of place now.
Naturally, I took photos of what I could see, and naturally/unnaturally, depending upon your point of view, Olga asked for numerous photos to be taken of herself to go with her numerous selfies.
The Greg Wilcox bag, a fantasy military shoulder bag befittingly finished in olive drab, donated to me by my old friend Greg some time in the recent past, had been requisitioned for today’s trip. Hidden in it were sandwiches, sweets, fruit and a flask of coffee. This bag was slung over my shoulder as I stretched my legs in the square. Had you been nearby, over near the church, perhaps, or furtively lurking behind any one of several ornamental canons, you might have seen me extract from this bag a savoury roll and a large banana. A note to the uninitiated: Always take some snacks with you when embarking on a bus tour.
Stop over ~ Olga complaining that it was over too soon; that we had not seen enough ~ it was back on the bus: ‘chop, chop!’
Could it be Dobrovolsk?
After a brief interlude of highway driving, we left the beaten track. The Kaliningrad region (Kaliningrad Oblast) covers an area of approximately 15,000 square kilometres. In the past decade, a spanking new network of highways have made regional travel far more comfortable and infinitely more express, but the land is still criss-crossed with old Gerry roads, which are typically long, straight and narrow and lined on either side by sizeable trees.
It was by recourse to this web of smaller roads that we eventually ended up ~ and I choose the phrase ‘ended up’ with considered deliberation for its sense of where we felt we were ~ seemingly tucked away in a strangely quiescent nowhere hidden away in the back of beyond.
From the elevated vantage point of our bus windows ~ one of the advantages of travelling by modern bus is its height, since it allows you to see things which at eye level in an average-sized car would be at best half visible if not plainly indistinct ~ it appeared to us that we were driving into the centre of somewhere; a core area of something. But what exactly, I was not sure. It was a large space that would have been open was it not for the dominant presence of a prodigious, vented, cylindrical Soviet war monument, a tall obelisk arranged in three parts set in paved grounds surrounded by trees and shrubs.
To the right of this monument-occupied otherwise empty space stood a series of small prefab sheds, white with sloping roofs, which looked commercial in purpose. One, in fact, was a café, but whatever function the rest fulfilled all looked closed and vacant. The impermanent nature of these huts put me in mind of the sort of thing common to British seaside resorts back in the 1960s.
At the far end of this contrastive arrangement, a long, grey building presided, which had its origins in the German past. Although in part it contained the settlement’s shop, the spectacle of the Russian flag hoisted upon its front lent to the whole a distinctly municipal air.
The gravity and dignity which this building bestowed, counterpoised as it was with the row of little white huts, was not, however, salient. That accolade went to the war memorial, which, not in its size and scale but by virtue of its symbolic presence, dwarfed everything around it.
These centralising elements, particularly the preponderous nature of the carefully choreographed cenotaph, whilst engaging all normal senses, were yet softened and enveloped, near and far the same, by an already verdant call from a mid-summer fast approaching. But what was decidedly unaffected either by hand or by nature, nature, that is to say, divined at its most natural, was the felt presence of an invisible entity, an invisible mass of some description, which, whilst no one in their right mind would want to meet it at night, was, I am glad to say, in the full refulgence of open daylight at the better end of almost unbearable.
I am trying to remember another such brooding dominion in my life where the push-me pull-me forces were so exacting. I know there have been some, even perhaps too many, but in this place, at that time, the ambivalent impulse to stay and go exerted an indescribable strength, so strong in its contradiction that either nothing I had experienced was quite so remarkable of its kind or the power that it wielded had wiped the slate of memory clean.
It was, therefore, with regret and relief and a kind of mystical thank you that, with our explorations for now concluded, we clambered back on board the bus and took off for another world, one hopefully less unfamiliar.
Another long trek through the old East Prussian countryside on roads narrow and lined with trees and for the most part empty of vehicles, brought us by and by to another public space of note in the centre of what I guesstimated was a small provincial town but was later told had city status.
Here our bus was met by the head honcho of the town’s museum, who preceded to deliver what I have no doubt was a most informative lecture on the history of the township and the biographies of its great and good. Unfortunately, however, two factors weighted against staying the course of his holding forth, which were that (a) my work-in-progress Russian permitted me to catch only so much of what it was he was saying, and (b) all of us from the coach were standing there in the midday sun slowly baking like a tray of potatoes. Thus, we sincerely trust, without incurring lasting offence, we sidled off to renew our acquaintance with an old and thoughtful friend. It was Mr Vladimir Lenin, who, standing high upon a plinth with an air of requited authority was, for all his self-assurance, looking rather upstaged, we thought, so we gave him the benefit of our attention and made his day by taking a snapshot.
At length, with the man from the museum having reached the close of his not inconsiderable address, we rejoined our bus-prone group and allowed ourselves to be led away towards the town’s museum, passing on the way a group of local drunks who, observing our ordered formation on Russia’s Pioneers’ Day could not resist lampooning us, calling out with a snigger: “Are you pioneers?” They could not have made me feel more at home than had I been walking down Rushden High Street past the drunks that congregate outside the Rose and Crown. But we sallied forth away from them, like the cultured folk we were; away from their mid-day quips, away from their cool, their corrupting, their challenging, their callous and chilled cans of beer!
Krasnoznamensk and its museum
I like my museums like I like my antique auction houses: old buildings labyrinthed with rooms. Thus, Krasnoznamensk museum and I were destined to get on famously.
The exhibits contained therein are drawn from every-day life in the former East Prussian region, from and across the time when its occupants were German to and across the time when its occupants were Soviet. The displays range in type and scale from pottery fragments skilfully mounted between the frames of picture boards, a simple but effective technique which I must remember to try myself, to chunky household furniture, reconstructed Soviet kitchens and cottage-industry weaving machines. There is more than enough paraphernalia upturned into the present from its resting place within the past to make obsolescence a thing of the future, including ~ and these are my favourites ~ hand-written letters, objects of ephemera, 19th century postcards, diaries and scrapbooks ~ intimate records of social history on which I place the highest value.
It was of no insurmountable consequence that I struggle in reading Russian and that the only words I know in German, other than Adolf Hitler, are ‘achtung’ and ‘schnell’, since help was on hand to translate the Soviet texts (you cheat, you!), and I found the German scrapbooks largely understandable. The newspaper cutting headlines and snipped extracts from magazines could often be worked out, especially when there were images present, and the published and personal photographs were all but perfectly self-explanatory.
One exhibit which particularly caught my time-obsessive eye was a torn and mottled document, on which was written in a hand exquisitely calligraphic and laid out with the exalted precision fabled of the Germanic race, an inventory of goods and chattels belonging to the writer’s home. Completed comprehensively, this illuminating historical record had been carefully rolled into a scroll and slotted for safe keeping inside a metal cannister. The lid had then been screwed on tight and the time capsule secreted away within the wall of the writer’s house, and there it had remained undisturbed for over a century. Great galloping goose bumps Batman!
Above: The time capsule dates to 1905. It was discovered on 8th July 2019 in the wall of a building in Youth Street, Dobrovolsk, Kaliningrad region.
Above: Condition of handwritten document preserved as a time capsule.
Above: Close-up of the handwritten paper found within the time capsule.
By the time we emerged from the museum, time itself had moved on and taken the piss artists ~ that delightful bunch of fellows who had so kindly serenaded us earlier ~ with it, leaving us with a bench on which we could sit in peace and enjoy our ice creams. There are times when time can be nothing but cruel, and at other times awfully kind.
Once all of us pioneers had been assembled, we set off, guided-tour fashion, not in the direction of our charabanc but towards a piece of notable scenery.
The weather was made for meandering, and our walk, taken in low gear at deliberate tourist speed, took us down a steepish street with some lovely old houses on either side, the culmination of which was a landscape painter’s view of an archetypal red-brick church resting on a hill.
The pictorial composition with the church seen in the distance on top of its grassy eminence, bucolically framed by trees and meadows, its inverted mirror image reflecting in the river, made me reach for the brushes and easel that I have never had and oddly enough did not bring with me, and which, even if I had and did, I could not have used in a month of Sundays (this is where Victor is needed). So, I reached for my camera instead.
We had come to a halt on a small knoll leading up to the sluice gates of a dam. From this position, and along the lower embankment, the water barely moving, pooling in the river’s widest point before making its rapid descent over the crest of the barrier, the lucky sightseeing tourist is treated to a first-class display of contrasting natural elements. In the foreground ~ suspension, energy, drama, a continual state of momentum; away and to the rear ~ unity and balance, a time-honoured pastoral tranquillity. Juxtaposition holds its own on the fringe of this chocolate box scene but is exceeded by a clever aesthetic in which we and Harmony have no doubt that she is the pedastalled Goddess and Contrast her submissive.
Having seen the church from afar, it was no other trick of nature that in the space of a short bus ride we were at its gates and then inside. The once Lutheran institution, which, as far as the cursory eye could see, had undergone no dramatic changes to its external heritage, had surrendered within, however, to the will of the reigning Orthodoxy.
Mercifully, in this instance, the exchange of religious affiliation had done nothing to damage the age-old idea of church as a place for retreat and sanctuary, and neither was it sufficient to have harmed and/or eroded all that we had been taught as children, that irrespective of denomination a church is always a church, a temple within whose hallowed walls everyone talks in whispers. With this particular church, even the least devout of Christians would be hard pushed to come away without confessing some admiration for the splendiferous Orthodox décor and a love of the heavenly scent lifted into the air from a multiplicity of burning wax candles.
Among the congregation of the church, there were these three Storks ~ you know the sort of thing: those prehistoric, long-legged birds native to these lands ~ who were conspicuous for their absence. They were standing not so far away looking like beaks on stilts above their ginormous nests, which they had built without permission on the tall tops of some telegraph poles, protruding from the yard of a deserted industrial building. “We never saw nuttin,” they seemed to say. “We were here, at home, all day, minding our business as usual.”
Above: Did you know that storks can be camera shy? She sat down as I was taking the photo.
It may be of interest for you to know that stopping off for a bite to eat had been included in the price of our tour. As that was something that never happened at the ‘Big Meat Pie’, and by now it was half-past three, we were all getting rather peckish. “I should think you jolly well would be!” reasoned the storks. So we said our goodbyes to them, waved farewell to the church and shot off in the bus.
Seeing the Kaliningrad region by coach
On our way to somewhere else (Nemanskoye), it was made known to us that the restaurant awaiting our patronage was located in the same settlement where the last venue of the day, a museum to local and Soviet history, was our current destination. The master plan was simple: split the company into two groups; one group to the museum; the other off to the restaurant. We were in the restaurant group and that was fine with me.
By and by the bus came to rest on a piece of rough ground. I presumed that the large German building to the left of us with a giant mural on its gable end had to be our restaurant, but I couldn’t have been more wrong than had I won first prize in the Getting It Wrong on A Bus Tour show.
In my defence, however, there was nothing in the near vicinity remotely restaurant-like. Before us stood some old brick barns, worth their weight in golden history, and behind us a red-brick building with a broad and sweeping roof, which, judging by its maintained appearance and the tended garden in which it stood, was, I inferred, the museum. Give the man a coconut! This time I got it right!
Above: Vicarage when the region was German. Now a museum dedicated to Soviet social history.
Unlike the other venues we had stopped at on our journey, this hamlet had no centre. All it appeared to consist of was half-a-dozen humble cottages on either side of the road. Where on earth in a place like this could the restaurant be? I wondered.
I was still wondering this when the game of follow my leader began. We were heading in the direction of a typical row of East Prussian cottages, brief terraces under one roof often topped with asbestos; one-storey dwellings which logically could have been two, as almost all German houses built to this spec scattered across the region have room enough in their attics in which to hide a doodlebug.
We were walking across the opening to a yard which, with its sloping sheds, buckling barns, old wagons, oil drums, chickens and a cat, had ‘rural smallholding’ written all over it. What it did not have, however, was a sign saying ‘restaurant’. Nevertheless, before long, we would be stooping under a home-made porch, frightening off a gaggle of children who were hanging around outside and making the cat go ‘meow’. I replied in kind, of course; forever the well-behaved Englishman.
Above: View from inside the restaurant into the back yard.
Normally, a provincial building of this type would be segregated into three or four parts, that is to say three or four homes, with the front doors lined up in series along the longer edge, which is often, but not always, the side that borders the road. Bucking the trend, however, this building ~ it was our restaurant ~ was accessed through the gable-end wall. I imagine that at some time in its history the intersecting walls had been removed in order to transform the building into what it had become, one long rectangular room.
It was welcomingly cool within, if not a trifle chilly and definitely feeling and smelling unused, in the sense of quaintly damp. Several laid tables with four seats apiece were arranged in sequence along one side, the side with the windows that bordered the road.
The decoration was rather spartan and most of all it did not fit. And yet, its being so oddly mis-matched made it a place like nobody else’s, and a memorable one at that. The restaurant had a bar where similar things were going on. At first it was alluring, but faster than immediately, you could say quite at once, it lost its appeal and attraction, like a sequestered piece of ground might do if thought at first to be a garden when in fact it was a graveyard. Every bottle on every shelf and attached to every optic was as empty and forlorn as a liberal comedian’s repertoire and looked as if they had been that way before recollection had been invented. The bar did have Jim Beam, however! But, of course, it didn’t.
It was socially unacceptable, so many empty bottles, a little like reading the local obituaries first thing over breakfast to see which of your remaining friends had died the night before. With a heartfelt sigh, I turned away. I might even have said a short prayer. And if I didn’t, I should have done.
Above: Is there something a bit Old West going on here? The drinks had certainly gone west.
Ordinarily, I am not a fatty fry-ups man, but today I was so hungry ~ the proverbial hungry traveller ~ that I could have seen off a plate of bacon and eggs, no problem ~ minus the bacon, of course. However, the menu had but one thing on it, of which we had been forewarned but it did not follow had come forearmed.
Today’s special was billed as a traditional Lithuanian delicacy. It was normally stuffed with meat, but a vegetarian option, in which the animal parts had been replaced by potatoes, was about to make its debut. So, let it not be said that I had not been adequately catered for!
When the dish was slapped on our table, however, I greeted it with deep suspicion bordering on alarm. Whatever was it supposed to be? It embodied the shape of a Cornish pasty but had such a pallor of sickly white that the last to make its acquaintance must surely have been Count Dracula. It glistened from head to toe with something that looked like nitro-glycerine and was crowned with a caking of crispy brown stuff, which, I rightly or wrongly presumed, was a pinch or a sprinkling of bacon burnt. Vegetarian or not, it had an altogether living look, like an alien cheaply made for an early episode of Dr Who before Big Budget turned it woke.
I nibbled just a bit, just to be polite, but could not disguise my aversion. At the very least it reminded me of those rubbery, stodgy, suet dumplings routinely and far too regularly offered up as food at school (which you had better eat or else!) and which dropped from gullet to guts like British Navy depth charges onto states of panic in the turmoil below.
Politely saying, “I think I will pass”, was not on the menu either. There it sat, this delicious delicacy, as bold as bollocks upon my plate. It could only be a matter of time before the guards discovered that Appetite was missing and would drag me away for interrogation: “You don’t like it? Why? What is wrong with you? Why don’t you like it?” Every question they fired at me sounded like an accusation.
In fairness, and unfairness, we vegetarians are used to this. I myself have 48 years of used to. But it certainly is not everyday, especially in these enlightened times, that turning down a recipe on the grounds that meat might be lurking in it attracts such grave astonishment from an audience so astounded. Every person within the room, that is every person without exception, was gawping in my direction, some with their forks comically frozen midway to their mouths, as if they could not believe their eyes and ears. How could one be so rude to that lovely hunchbacked anaemic thing crouching on our plates.
I lowered my eyes to my own plate; it was right and proper to do so; such indefensible shame. The source of my torment grinned back at me in a state of half-mutilation: “Eat me! Eat Me!” it goaded. Where was Alice’s Wonderland when you needed to shrink in it most!?
“These people,” I thought to myself indignantly. “Why do these people complain?” (Although no one was complaining.) After all, whatever it was we were eating, or not as the case may be, had come from Lithuania. It was not as if I was turning down honest-to-goodness buckwheat or good old kapoosta pie; those I can eat ‘till the bears come home! I simply, but categorically, had lost myself in the critical fog of what, by all accounts, should have been that Lithuanian moment.
Glad I came to the restaurant, gladder when I came out, all I had left was the cat for a friend. It followed me to the roadside and saw me off with a last ‘meow’, saying “No one can blame you, Englishman. Given the opportunity, I wouldn’t have eaten it either.”
“Must be a Russian cat,” I thought.
Banquet over, I tightened my belt and put on my museum hat. It was by far the better thing to do. If museums be the food of love, move on!
Above: Museum as seen from the grass area on the opposite side of the road.
Nemanskoye Museum
The renovated but not spoilt building now occupied by Nemanskoye museum is devoted generally to an exposition of Soviet cultural history and specifically to life in the village of Nemanskoye from the end of the Great Patriotic War to the fall of the U.S.S.R.. In German times the house had doubled as the home of the vicar and village hall, a place where meetings could be held to air and discuss community matters.
Now, as a museum, the connection between the past and the present could not be more complete. It is as sharp as a contactless card: Cross the threshold it registers. The connection is a personal one. The museum so thoughtfully tended with personal love and care wires you into its memory banks quicker than you can say ‘Life was harder in those times but somehow remarkably more in touch with the core of who and what we are’.
The Soviet story of life in the settlement and the lessons learnt in humanity passed down through the decades from the vicarage that was, and the influence they brought to bear in creating this private museum, whether predetermined or acausal, have a humanist continuity that is worth revisiting at a later date and thus in a later post. Although my sound advice to the reader is go and see for yourself.
Epilogue
At the outset of this post, I confided in you my reservations about sailing off on coach trips. Never a beckoning finger or a tune that would have me dancing to it have persuaded me to think otherwise, but had I stuck to my prejudiced guns and been led by nothing but precedent, what, odds I wonder, would Ladbrokes have given me of my ever encountering the historic delights I experienced thanks to this tour?
True one or two of the stops we made had been little more than flying visits, such is the nature of coach tours, but they made an impressionable mark, so that should the compulsion assert itself, which I am fairly certain it will, then these introductions may pave the way for further exploration.
Thus, the moral of this story is, in case you have not deduced it yet, that, as with many things in life, and guided tours are no exception, give it the benefit of the doubt: ‘don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!’
Updated: 30 June 2024 | First Published: 29 January 2023 ~ Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony
I’m sure, almost certain, that it was not there 18 months ago when I last visited Zelenogradsk (doesn’t time fly!), but it was there now. I am talking about a new restaurant ~ new to me ~ that sits smack bang at the midway point of Zelenogradsk’s serpentine high street: a large, impressive, luxurious establishment set back from the street inside a broad paved plaza, its plate-glass single-storey extension forming a scaled juxtaposition against the taller four-storey building to which it is attached, the latter meticulously refurbished to a grand and imposing standard.
In the winter months when we were in town, the first impression of this restaurant from the outside looking in was PC; that’s not politically correct, but plush and cosy.
It was bitterly cold that day, and if the hallmark of a successful bar or restaurant is principally defined by the pulling power it possesses to tempt one off the street, then rest assured Balt restaurant has it.
Oh, did I forget to tell you? The name of the restaurant is Balt.
The first impression from the exterior of the building, which is so categorically bourgeoisie that Lenin had turned his back to it, was swish. I made a mental note, a simple equation: plush+posh+impressive+coastal-resort-town-centre = expensive. So, let’s jump to the bill. We had three dishes, nothing elaborate, a speciality tea and a glass of beer. It didn’t break the bank.
The second impression the Balt conveys is ‘big’. “It’s so big!” say your senses, when perhaps what they should be saying is not that it’s so ‘big’ but “It’s so tall”! In keeping with the modern trend in bar and restaurant design, the Balt is undeniably big, but, initially and accurately, the spaciousness perceived is confined to the height of the ceiling. In fact, the seating area which leads away from the entrance hall is limited to the perimeter of the extended part of the building; it forms the letter ‘L’, being a long, but slightly wider than the word implies, corridor. This is because, once again conforming to popular predilections, the restaurant is built around the kitchen, in other words built to a plan in which a centralised kitchen is King.
In the olden days, restaurants concealed their kitchens as though they were the black sheep of the family, the philosophy seeming to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’. This closeted mentality was an excellent way of keeping patrons on edge, since they never knew come the following morning, having enjoyed their meal the night before, whether their friends would be ready and waiting to scream, “You didn’t eat there, did you!” and then hamming it up with relish, proceed to recount in lurid detail the latest hygiene scandal.
Today, there is no need to be told by the ‘well-meaning’ ~ friends, family or the media ~ what goes on in restaurant kitchens, because everything is on display and laid out for the eyes to see. Restaurant kitchens have come of age. They are open, accessible, uninhibited, something to be admired, something to be proud of, not hidden away like a seedy back room in the depths of a mucky book shop. Restaurant kitchens have been emancipated, and a large part of that liberation lies in the transformation from an observance of cautious propriety to out-and-out exhibitionism.
True, some bar and restaurant designs tend to over-egg the soufflé. Displaying a kitchen eagerly in all its stainless steel, hygiene-oriented, busy, industrious, functioning glory is one thing, but it is quite another and quite inexcusable to overdo the exposure. Thankfully, Balt’s kitchen is a far more sophisticated and in-keeping centrepiece, enabling it to escape comparison with a man in a mac on a hill surrounded by too little foliage. I think the word I am searching for is ‘subtle’.
In fact, everything about Balt, not in its individual accoutrements but taken as a job lot, regarded in its entirety, is the epitome of subtle. How this works exactly is rather clever, because Balt is far and away not without a surprise or two, not undernourished in novelty.
Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT
We were able to appreciate both the component parts of this dichotomy and its overarching effect from the favourable location of the table to which we had been escorted. The seats to which we had been shown occupied the latter portion upon the longer extension of the ‘L’ shaped room, almost at its inflection, thus availing us of a first-class view of each and all the different elements, which, when assembled as a whole, add up to the Balt experience.
First off, we were close to the kitchen, just a few feet away from the serving area: a long, curved counter on which chefs add the finishing touches to the dishes they are preparing before popping them into the tandoor oven, and from which attentive waiters pick up meals that are ready to go.
From our vantage point, we had a privileged view of the kitchen and the floor-to-ceiling tandoor, a large cylindrical-shaped oven used for baking unleavened flatbreads and for roasting meat. Once the open oven door and blazing fire beyond had ceased to remind me of crematoria, it was fun to watch the chef at work, sliding the various dishes and breads into the wood-fired oven with the help of a peel, a long-handled shovel-like implement with a flat metal pan attached to its furthest extremity.
Looking straight ahead, I noted with satisfaction the high-backed wooden chairs belonging to the nearest table. The back rests consisted of two vertical ebonised planks slightly angled toward one another. Close to their highest point a pair of semi-circles had been cut out so that in alignment they formed a circle. The only other concession to decoration was the seemingly random inclusion of small, pierced motifs ~ simple shapes which donated a touch of mystique without disturbing the minimalist balance.
My forward view also provided examples of ingenious lighting styles, including a heavy, orange tassel-roped pendant and lampshades mimicking small sheaths of straw.
The tables to the left and behind me were objects to be marvelled at. The tops were made of marble, the ends scalloped to give an uncut look. They were supported on a cluster of angled posts, recycled wave-breaking poles, some of which had been allowed to protrude through the table’s surface, and hovering above them with remarkable pendulosity was a clump or cluster of shell-like bowls, off-white in shade and in shape asymmetrical, which had me wondering, out loud as it happens, if they were really made from the pumpkin skins I imagined they were or from moulded papier-mâché
Every item in the Balt’s atmospheric makeup is an imagistic letter in the word and concept of ‘Natural’: wood, stone, fire, rope, straw, vegetables. At one end of the subtle spectrum, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble would not look out of place, but the Balt’s natural is a polished natural that borrows as much for its appeal on the application of chic sophistry as it does from down-to-earth and back-to-nature.
For all its emphasis on the natural world, Balt’s designers’ have hedged their bets, choosing not to preclude but include the fashionable tried and tested, omniprevalent in bar and restaurant, distressed industrial look.
This approach has become so widespread that it has gone beyond ‘must have’ to ‘can’t do without’. In the Balt, it has gone one further, becoming ‘Would you Adam and Eve it, the concept actually works!’: rocks, marble, stoneware vases, corn plants, vegetables and pieces of tree, rub along quite nicely, thank you, with gnarled brickwork, whitewashed slat-board, old beam ceilings, exposed ventilation ducts and suspended arty farty spots.
It is a tribute to Balt’s interior designers that they have managed to pull off a subtle, seamless fusion of modern chic and reclaimed-rundown and then wrap it all up in an eco-friendly ethnicity.
In a nutshell ~ and I am sure that Balt would approve of the use of such natural imagery ~ the key word to Balt’s come-hither and dine-within appeal is harmony. Everything, including things that would normally be at odds with each other, are wedlocked. It might be a marriage of convenience, but one that is no less perfect for it. Even the ethnic music, with its emphasis on tom-tom beat and repetitive chanting, is low-key, Sade-like and subtle.
At the centre and everywhere else of this is lighting. I’ve said it before; I’ve said it again; I’ll say it again and keep on saying it: from Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris to The Four Seasons B&B in Brightlingsea, if the lighting is not right everything else will be wrong. Lighting is the magic drawstring that pulls everything together.
Balt’s lighting is soft, suffused and artistically modulated: a harmonising integration of ambient-sensitive ceiling spots and downlighters, overhead table pendants ~ each paired with its own novel shade ~ soft-glow wall lights, natural fire and candles. It’s good, because it works. It works because it’s good.
At this juncture, I know what you are thinking: So much for the Balt’s design; what about the grub?
Those of you who have read any of my bar/restaurant reviews will know that when it comes to food I’m hopeless. Why do I go to bars? To drink. Why do I go to restaurants? Usually because the company I’m in wants to go to restaurants, and so I tag along, but also because, as you may have deduced, I am an ardent fan of interior design and a connoisseur of atmosphere.
As a baked-beans-on-toast man, a man who likes simple food, I cannot provide you with a gourmet breakdown of the range of food Balt has to offer or the quality of its meals, and neither shall I try. However, a quick twirl around the internet should satisfy your curiosity. It might even tell you all you need to know.
Our order at the Balt amounted to a snackette: a spicey vegetable platter on oven-baked bread ~ a white leavened flatbread similar in texture and taste to naan ~ and some exotic-looking poppadoms. It was not in the least expensive, but I will say that presentation took precedence over quantity. Now, were you to indulge in a main meal, the situation may be completely reversed or, like everything else at Balt, a happy medium struck.
I had a beer, naturally. It was palatable but served up in one of those peculiar ‘neither here nor there’ glasses, ie glasses that are neither small nor large, which frankly I find irritating. Half a litre, fine; half a half litre, fine; anything else exceeds my mathematical ability (see Soul Garden post).
The Balt, I am told, offers a range of dishes based on Indian subcontinent fare, which is something of a luxury in this part of the world. The prices are so-so, but not so expensive that they will tear the lining out of your pocket, and the carefully choreographed atmosphere, which is as restful and relaxing as it gets, beats anything I have experienced anywhere else in the Kaliningrad region or for that matter in the UK. Recommend the Balt? I’d buy it if I could!
The main thing Balt (restaurant) Kurortny Prospekt, 16, Zelenogradsk, Kaliningrad region
Angel Park Hotel > An inspirational rural recreation centre on the site of an East Prussian settlement Amber Legend Restaurant > Amber Legend Yantarny, a jewel in the coastal town of Yantarny Fishdorf Country Guest Complex > A family-oriented retreat, secluded and steeped in nature Fort Dönhoff (Fort XI) > An evocative 19th century redbrick fortress, part of Königsberg’s labyrinth defence network Polessk Brewery > Beer, history and German-Gothic architecture (that’s my personal order of preference!)
30 April 2024 ~ Kaliningrad Celebrates Kant on his 300th Year
Of the many things that Kant and I do not have in common, two stand out more than others. The first is that he was one of the world’s great philosophers, considered to be the third wheel behind Plato and Aristotle, the second he did not like beer. The first is an accomplishment worthy of applause; the second we will let quietly slip away, as it does not behove a gentleman of such intellectual stature whose name is synonymous with logic and reason.
Not widely read today, because his style of writing does not conform to the SEO prescription for sentences of 20 words or less, it is indeed a sobering thought that had Kant lived in the early 21st century, the systematic dumbing down of language and generational attention deficit attendant on this rule, would seriously have obstructed him in his quest to play linguistic games on paper. Instead of engaging the intellect with works of a ground-breaking nature, he would most likely be biding his time posting snippets to Twitter, taking selfies for social media, and pinning pictures of cakes on Pint-rest (incorrectly referred to as Pinterest). Deprived of these unspeakable pleasures, he had to be content with the lesser mental dynamics required to come to grips with epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.
300 Years of Kant
Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, East Prussia, where he lived until he died on 12 February 1804. Hardly venturing from his home city, Kant, nevertheless, through philosophical thought based on transcendental idealism, is largely credited for changing the way that people think around the world. So, if you have ever wondered why it is that you think the way you do, just think Kant and you have the answer.
Kaliningrad Celebrates Kant on his 300th Year
In life, Kant was a professor at Königsberg University, specialising in logic and metaphysics; in death, he lays entombed near Königsberg Cathedral on the appropriately named Kant Island ~ Kneiphof Island in Königsberg times.
Did you know? Kant was German. I bet you knew that. But did you know that for seven years he became a Russian subject? During the ‘Seven Years’ War’ in Europe, Austria’s allies, Russia, captured the East Prussian city of Königsberg , whereupon Kant, along with other Konigsberg citizens, pledged his allegiance to the Russian empress, Elizabeth. It was an allegiance he would not renounce even after Königsberg was returned to East Prussian rule.
As a philosopher of universal acclaim, a distinguished member of Königsberg ’s academia and one of the city’s most prominent citizens, Kant was fully qualified to be buried inside the cathedral itself. In 1880 that honour was extended when his remains were exhumed and rehoused in a chapel purpose built for him at the cathedral’s northeast corner, opposite the then prestigious Albertina University.
Was he boring, Kant? History has it that Kant was so regular in his routines that Königsbergians could set their watch by him. His habit of walking the same route at the same time each day earnt him the nickname of ‘The Konigsberg Clock’. However, contrary to his stereotype, that he was dull and prone to reclusiveness, Kant, by all accounts, possessed an uncommonly good sense of humour, loved to drink red wine and was a congenial host of dinner parties.
The university perished in the heavy Allied bombing of World War Two, but the mausoleum that would eventually replace Kant’s chapel, the one that we know today, whilst not escaping damage entirely at least escaped it sufficiently to allow for restoration.
Described by some as ‘minimalist’, the simple column and canopy structure has a certain aesthetic elegance and a dignity not detracting from the cathedral’s Gothic profile. The chapel, built in 1924, is the brainchild of Friedrich Lahrs, renowned East Prussian architect.
“The anniversary of the philosopher will be celebrated by the whole of Kaliningrad and guests of the city. The International Kantian Congress, various lectures, presentations, seminars, concerts, excursions, performances, as well as several exhibitions are planned here. Events dedicated to the 300th anniversary of Kant will take place in the city throughout 2024.”
16 January 2024 ~ Honey House Kaliningrad is the Bees Knees
Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow wrote the lyrics, and the Beatles commercialised it. It was called a Taste of Honey, and the memorable refrain went, “A taste of honey / A taste much sweeter than wine.”
Frank Sinatra got it right when he sang, “You can drink the water, but I will drink the wine.”
OK, so no contest between wine and honey and wine and water, but water is good for washing wine glasses and honey is delicious and, they say, extremely good for you, especially when it is not compared with wine but used as one of the main ingredients in the preparation of mead.
Honey House Kaliningrad
The Murd House, not to be confused with the English ‘Murder House’, roll out Vincent Price, is an excessively large, palatial and unmissably bright yellow-coloured mansion of a place, which, in spite of its flamboyance, is oddly concealed along an early twentieth century street in an erstwhile suburb of the East Prussian city of Königsberg.
There was a time that as big and as bright as the building is, it still achieved relative anonymity, due to its partly concealed location. For example, a mid-rise block of flats makes it virtually invisible to cars passing by on the main drag. Thankfully, about three years ago, some bright spark came up with the idea of pinning a large sign on a nearby fence with ‘Murd House’ written on it and an arrow pointing in the right direction, an initiative one hopes that has gone some way towards alleviating comparative obscurity.
In Russian the word ‘Murd’ means honey (There you are, you see, there is a connection!) In English, ‘Murd House’ becomes Honey House or the House of Honey.
Honey House Kaliningrad
Whilst in itself vast, the Baroque pastiche that is the Honey House would dwarf a good sized supermarket, and whilst I have no idea what goes on in the majority of the building, I do know, as I have used it often, that secreted at a corner of this extraordinary building sits one of the best stocked honey shops in Kaliningrad.
Kaliningrad’s central market is hard to beat for almost everything, and that includes honey. It has a spacious and brand-spanking-new food hall that is exclusively given over to many different types of honey, sold in many different sized tubs. But the Honey House’s diminutive size is nothing if not deceptive. This small shop stocks an unbelievably exciting range of honey. Consider this, if you will: Acacia Honey, Mountain Honey, Yellow Sweet Clover Honey, several varieties of Buckwheat Honey. And these are just a small sample of the different kinds of honey offered by the Honey House, either scooped into tubs at your behest or sold in prepacked jars. How do those clever bees manage it!
The products purveyed by the Honey House are not confined to different flavoured honey, it also sells chocolate, confectionary, breakfast cereals, honey straws, biscuits, cosmetics and a whole lot more, all rich in the magic versatility of one of the healthiest natural substances known to man, honey.
Not that alcohol holds any interest to me, I’m strictly sarsaparilla, but the Honey House even purveys an alcohol-infused beverage simply known as Honey Drink, which to you and me is mead. Have I tried it? Have I ever put on a pair of shoes?
Why don’t you put on yours and buzz off down to the Honey House.
The Honey House The House of Honey/Honey House/Murd House (take your pick) began life in 2000, the objective being to popularise beekeeping in the Kaliningrad region. Initially, the mainstay of the enterprise was to provide beekeeping farms with equipment, medications and breeding material.
Today, the Honey House is a bio-shop, which means that it only sells natural products. Thus, products bearing the ‘Slavyansky Medovar’ trademark guarantee consistently high production standards and tasty food from natural ingredients.
Also available from the Honey House: Bee-keeping equipment Medications for bee keeping Bee-keeping clothing Hives and components
and:
Fragrances for candles Candle-making moulds Candle extinguishers
The main thing:
House of Honey Ulitsa Nekrasova 18А, Kaliningrad Kaliningrad Oblast, 236016
The art, science and agony of waiting: a round trip from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk, Poland
Updated 5 January 2024 | Published: 19 January 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
In November 2022, my wife Olga and I travelled from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk. It was the first time I had made this journey since the advent of coronavirus.
This account should be read in conjunction with my post How to Get to Kaliningrad from the UK and treated as an addendum to the information contained therein. It is hoped that it may help you to decide whether or not to take this route in the future and what to expect if you do. To be forewarned is to be forearmed ~ not that to be forearmed will do you any good.
Passage to and from the UK to Kaliningrad via Gdansk Airport is, in the post-apocalyptic coronavirus world, now the era of unprecedented sanctions, a realistic if not tedious alternative to the other options available to you. By no means the most traveller-friendly route, nevertheless as an A to B expedient, with a great deal of fortitude and more of patience you will eventually arrive at your destination without incurring the need to navigate every letter in the traveller’s alphabet.
Recently, in November 2022, this was the route we took to travel to the UK. Pre-coronavirus we always took a taxi from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. At a cost of approximately £100, of the two options, bus or taxi, the latter, of course, was the more expensive, but what it lacked in economy it more than made up for in comfort, door-to-door convenience and, most importantly, a smoother, less traumatic transition at the Russian-Polish border.
Our November trip was the first in which I would take a bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. Kaliningrad Central Bus Station is a wonderful Soviet incarnation, built, I should imagine, circa 1970s. It is neat, tidy, user-friendly and surrounded by shops and refreshment facilities.
There’s nothing to bussing it from Kaliningrad: You just pass yourself and your luggage through a scanning system, buy your tickets in the usual way from the counter ~ thankfully staff-manned, not machine-oriented ~ and when it is time to catch your bus, brandishing your barcoded ticket, off you go through the gates.
Not one for using minibuses on any journey except in town, I was relieved to find on the day of travelling that we were blessed with a proper coach.
We were required to load our cases into the luggage compartment ourselves, which was no great shakes as we were travelling light. Even so, if you happen to be an old codger suffering from comorbidities or a damsel in distress, you may find that you need to enlist the kindly services of a fellow-travelling Sir Galahad, since loading luggage of any kind does not come under the driver’s remit.
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
The journey to the Russian border in Kaliningrad is an effortless one, taking around 30 to 40 minutes in all. From the other direction, Gdansk Airport, the distance is the greater of the two. But travelling isn’t the problem; it’s the waiting you have to worry about.
Whether you travel by car or by bus, prepare yourself mentally for an indescribably protracted period of boredom at both border checkpoints. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a competition between the Russian and Polish authorities to see who can make your stay at the border more drawn out and uncomfortable. In days gone by, when Russians flocked to Poland to buy sausages and the Polish nipped back and forth to Kaliningrad to smuggle in cheap vodka and fags, crossing from either direction, Russia to Poland, Poland to Russia, was a traffic-queuing nightmare. But at least then it was understandable why it took so long.
Now, in the New Normal ~ in the coronavirus aftermath and knock-on effect from the troubles in Ukraine ~ queues at the border, which is to say magnificent queues, are largely a thing of the past, but interminable waiting is not.
For example, on the day that we travelled, there were two cars in front of us and no one behind us, but still it took four hours to cross from Russia into Poland.
By taxi the process is quicker, not substantially so, but it is quicker and a lot less painful. On both sides of the border, Russian and Polish, our driver would take it upon himself to hand over our passports to the authorities whilst we sat in the car until summoned to appear before the border officer’s window.
This procedure is strangely daunting. It has its equivalent in the unfounded guilt you feel (and I am certain that you do) whenever a copper walks by (“Evenin’ all!”). I find that it both helps and doesn’t if, whilst standing under the border officer’s partly hidden officious eye, you imagine yourself in the leading role of one of Len Deighton’s spy novels.
One other thing, other difference between the taxi and the bus, is that when you take a taxi your bags are checked in the car. A uniformed man or woman with stern features out of a can, asks you to open your bags and then studiously looks at your underpants (hopefully those in the case, not the ones you are wearing!). He, or a colleague, will also bring a dog along to sniff around for drugs (in your cases not your underpants) which, of course, we never have (drugs, that is, not underpants) except, perhaps, if you can call them drugs, a vintage bottle of Bile Beans which, through force of habit as well as nostalgia, I carry for good luck. Get away! You don’t! Do you?
By bus the procedure though similar is far more demanding, obviously because the vehicle you are travelling in contains more people and more people means more documents to process but also because each passenger is required to lug his, her or its own luggage out of the bus, across the tarmac and into a bland and impersonal room.
Here you queue obediently, waiting for the inquisition before the border officer’s cubicle. No smiling, this is serious business, so why on earth do I always feel an uncontrollable urge to laugh? Eternity comes and goes and suddenly stamp, stamp, stamp, they are inking little official things in the pages of your passport. This is music to your ears, for next they will dismiss you, and you’ll suffer to drag your heavy cases across to the waiting conveyor belt in order to have them scanned for all those things that you shouldn’t have stashed, and didn’t stash, inside.
Admittedly, this hiatus in your journey does provide you with the opportunity to pay the bog a visit, making it not entirely a waste of time. The problem is, however, that you can almost guarantee that one or more in your party are either not in possession of the prerequisite travel documents or are carrying something in their bags in contravention of regulations. When this happens, as it did for us, your wait at the border can be delayed to such a frightful extent that by the time you eventually move, you have forgotten what movement was. Thus, do not be surprised if you have read War and Peace from cover to cover, experienced a couple of birthdays and your restless arse is covered in cobwebs by the time the bus starts rolling. Naw, it’s not as bad as all that; but believe you me, it is bad enough!
Whilst we all know from experience that the wheels of bureaucracy tend to grind slowly no matter where we are, what kind of mentality is it that oils the cogs of rudeness?
It is sad to admit, but all the same a regrettable fact, that border security on both sides of the fence, be it the Russian or Polish side, can be, and mostly are ~ with one or two exceptions ~ how can I put it? ~ beyond officious. Let us just conclude that anyone working for border control is unlikely to be considered for a post in the diplomatic core and prudently leave it at that.
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
So, you have been stared at, stamped and waved on, survived death by terminal boredom and at last the wheels are turning. The bus that you are travelling in, which contains people a lot more stressed and impatient than the ones you started out with, trumps off up the road, gets stuck, for extra harassment measure, at two or more sets of traffic lights and then trundles forward a few more yards before grinding to a sickening halt on the Polish side of the border.
And it’s here we go again: the only noteable difference being the cut of the uniforms and insignia on them.
By the time we arrived at the airport we were veterans in the waiting game, but even our rigorous introduction was insufficient to prepare us for what was yet to come.
I will say that as far as design is concerned, I personally like Gdansk Airport ~ all those tubular steel struts, asymmetrical folds and sweeps and the way that the ceiling soars like giant birds in flight. Great visuals and expressive atmosphere; shame about the security staff. They are as rude as rude, but there is entertainment to be had in being to them what Manuel was to Basil in Fawlty Towers: “Qué?”
Above: I can’t stand the waiting any longer; you’ll have to go by yourself!
On the day that we travelled through Gdansk Airport nothing short of utter confusion reigned. The flight was scheduled for 3.10pm and our bus driver, who would normally have deposited us at Gdansk bus station, realising that those of us who required the airport were in danger of missing our flights because of the long delay at the border, drove us on to the airport terminal. We sailed through Gdansk airport security system, bought a couple of bottles from the duty free and checked the electronic flight boards. Everything was fine; but then it wasn’t. The flight at 3.10 had become the delayed flight to the UK departing at 4.30! A Jack Daniels with ice helped.
We were sat close to gate 27, where we should have been, when, suddenly, it was ‘all aboard’ but at gate 28! The flight time has also changed to 4pm, but at 3.50pm they are opening the gates, and we are all on our feet and queuing. Our so-called priority passes, which do nothing more than allow you to queue lower down the stairwell than those who have been smart enough not to pay for the privilege, put us in this position, where we stood with mounting impatience for nigh on fifteen minutes, before it was announced that we had to return to the waiting area.
As we passed one of the company’s representatives, I asked why? What was happening? His reply: “We are waiting for a new captain!” Good heavens, I thought, I hope he qualifies before next spring. I did offer to fly the plane myself. Humouring me, the man asked if I had a licence. “Dog or TV?” I replied. Flying licence! “Well,” I said, “I’ve got a kite and an airman’s hat.”
Back in our seats, where we were fast becoming super-waiters, I hoped that the ‘new captain’ was not in fact the old captain, whose delay was due to one too many. I disclosed my fears to Olga, who thought she had caught a glimpse of someone wearing a battered captain’s hat and nothing else, being dunked in a bath of ice-cold water behind the airport’s dustbins, which is only a stones (or stoned) throw away from the airline’s Lame Excuse Department.
The electronic score board now informed us that the next flight from Gdansk to the UK was rescheduled for 5.30pm but, as before, it lied. Lucky for us we were far too tired to be somewhere else in the airport, for at 5pm we were off again, through the checkout and down the steps.
By now everyone without exception was suffering from chronic waiting disease. Many of our fellow passengers had found consolation in the bottle and as a result resembled zombies hired from Rent a Misfit.
At long last, it happened, but it didn’t: We, and the worse-for-wears were sitting on the plane but wait a moment … a moment … a moment … the pilot had not arrived. Was he waiting to be awarded his model aircraft flying diploma or had he got stuck in the bathtub?
At last it did happen! We had lift off! Shame that the same could not be said for the airline’s credit/debit card system. I presume it must have died from something like airport terminal waiting. And why was there no vodka on board? Hiccup! This is your captain slurring.
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
We landed at Luton Airport ~ now there’s a relief ~ where everything, I was pleased to find after almost three years’ absence remained delightfully British. Of course, there are obvious visual exceptions to the definition of what constitutes British, but the prevailing wind continues to blow in the direction of British standards. One contributory factor is that apart from the airport’s security guards, who are tooled up and reinforce-vested, London-Luton’s border control and its customs officers do not do military; smart and corporate is the name of the game and even the airport’s immigrant staff can scrub up satisfactorily when they put their mind to it. I’m not sure if the airport retains classic British salutations such as ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ or whether it has succumbed to pseudo-liberal pressure for gender-bending woke alternatives. But what I can say categorically is that as far as first impressions count, London Luton hits the spot.
The second thing you will notice at Luton Airport, indeed any airport in the UK, apart from the majority minorities, is that no sooner have you retrieved your cases than mugging your purse and wallet begins. UK airports are hideously expensive. London Luton’s Airport carpark must be run by the mob, as the cost of a two-minute stay in the so-called drop-off and pick-up zone is protection-racket extortionate. Yes, I think we can all agree that there’s nothing like England’s welcome mat, but once you have crossed the threshold you know that the meter is ticking.
Return journey
A piece of cake our trip to England certainly had not been, but the return journey took the biscuit. When we were outward bound, we had purposefully travelled light, but going back our extremely large cases were stuffed to the gills with items unobtainable in Kaliningrad, such as 40 jars of marmite, decorative retro metal wall signs, plus numerous gifts and souvenirs.
Having overdone it on shopping sprees, on visits to the pub, on workouts, on late nights and on generally trying to cram too much into too little time, our cases may have been full, but I was travelling on a half empty health tank ~ nothing like a good holiday to set you to rights, I say! And it was grim: the 4.30am start required to catch our flight from Luton was grim, but at least it was uneventful.
The real problems for us began when we arrived in Gdansk ~ and here is something you should bear in mind, especially if you are Russian.
Olga’s daughter had booked our return from Gdansk bus station using an online booking system. The bus was scheduled to depart at 6pm, but it was about 11am Polish time when we arrived at Gdansk airport. This disparity between the flight’s arrival and the bus’s departure had been purposefully contrived, as, although there was an earlier bus at one o’clock, the excessive delays on the outward journey had caused us to act with caution. Sod’s law had it, however, that the return flight was bang on schedule, and we were back in the business of waiting again.
Our immediate destination from the airport was the bus station. We would go there by taxi, stash our bags in the left luggage department, presuming that they had one, and then idle our time away.
Gdansk bus station is reminiscent of Corby dole office in the 1960s, even down to the stink of piss. It is a concrete catastrophe from that era, constructed on two levels, decorated with pigeon shite and a lift that does not work. The left luggage department is not a department as such, but a big tin thing on the station’s lower level split into different sized lockers with doors that need coins to operate them*. Consequently, we had a twofold problem: (1) Karting two incredibly heavy cases down umpteen flights of steps and (2) obtaining Polish coins in the correct denominations.
The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service.
One thing that Gdansk bus station did have going for it was that it had a cafeteria*. I use the term cafeteria because it reminded me of somewhere I once had the misfortune to visit on a school trip. I think it was the canteen of an up-North pickle factory. Our school was short on education but inventive in saving funds. {Apologies to Headmaster Lowe. I am not referring to the Prince William School but Chalky White’s secondary modern!)
*Please note that when I was in Gdansk in September 2023, both the left-luggage canisters and the cafeteria had ceased to exist, thus making Gdansk bus station an even more horrible place than it was before. Thought I’d better warn you. They haven’t closed the toilets yet, but it costs 5 zlotys a pee!
Knock the school if you like, but let’s don’t knock the cafeteria. At least it was somewhere to sit, to have a hot drink and a snack. Cosy, it was not; friendly, it was not. There are still some things to be said for England! But first we needed zlotys (that’s Polish money, if you did not know it).
The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service. We had no zlotys for tea, and we had no zlotys for the left-luggage lockers. Gdansk Bus Station Information office had no information. Exchanging tickets? An earlier bus? Don’t ask us, we’re only the information office.
We were both cold, tired, hungry and I was feeling ill.
I volunteered to go and seek out a ‘hole in the wall’, even though I instinctively knew, erroneously as it happened, that the location we were in was unlikely to be furnished with such a crucial convenience. Whilst I was gone, Olga said she would contact her daughter to see if it was possible for her to exchange the tickets online. It turned out that it wasn’t.
One 20-minute walk later, I espied the kind of hole I was looking for. It was not a hole in the wall exactly, but a hole protruding from a shop window. I did not like the look of this hole when I saw it from a distance and liked it even less at closer quarters. I certainly had no inclination to entrust my debit card to it in case the machine had been ‘got at’.
Flustered, and not relishing the thought of returning to Olga with mission unaccomplished, nevertheless this is what it amounted to. The real rub was that when I did return, Olga asked me why I had not used the cash dispenser at the front of the bus station? Doh! I had only walked straight past it! What a kick in the nuts! And the words of our old friend Barry, who had accompanied us on our trip to Kaliningrad way back in 2004, echoed across the decades, “You pair are a walking disaster!” ~ to be said in a northern accent.
Too tired to exonerate myself, I followed Olga’s directions but with the gravest misapprehension. The hole in the glass window which I had not used because it had looked dodgy was a paragon of virtue compared to the one at the bus station. The Perspex screen was scratched, it reflected dull orange in the LED light with which it was lit and the options that it displayed were almost indiscernible. It took four attempts to get it right, to extract money from that mean machine and throughout the entire dispensing experience I felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was a mean little machine in a mean hollowed-out husk of a building, and it also refused to provide a receipt.
Have zlotys will eat, we took refuge in the café. There we would buy tea from the miserable woman behind the counter, change some zloty notes into zloty coins to use in the left-luggage piggy bank, dispose of the bags, go for a walk.
It was a cold day but at the time of our walk it was blue skies and sunshine. We decided to return to Gdansk old town where we had not been since my first journey to Kaliningrad at the turn of the 21st century (makes me feel like Dr Who ~ the man version, not the PC one! {There was only one Dr Who and that was William Hartnell!})
Gdansk ‘old town ‘is, in fact, a perfect facsimile of the old town, since the old town underwent extensive modification thanks to Adolf Hitler and his Luftwaffe architects. However, if you ever go to Gdansk, the new-old town is well worth visiting.
We took in the sights and found food and warmth in one of the many restaurants, but now the sun had gone, leaving in its wake a sharp and chilling cold. With one and a half hours to kill, we made our way back to the bus station. We had no idea from which bay the bus we needed departed, so Olga did the logical thing, she returned to the bus information office.
As before, the information office which had no information about exchanging tickets had no information about our bus: Which Bay does your bus depart from? Don’t ask us we’re just the bus information service. We eventually worked it out for ourselves; not which bay we needed but that from the official information office to the average man on the street, once they tumbled that Olga was Russian, your Polack turned deaf and dumb. I suppose like every EU member, Poland is waiting for Biden to tell them when they can be polite again.
The second information office, which lay inside a concreted labyrinth of subterranean walkways, went one better. Not only did they not know from which bay our bus departed, they denied its very existence and the existence of the bus itself, although we had tickets to travel! It was beginning to get amusing.
Dragging the heavy cases from the lockers up two flights of steps and then loitering in the bitter wind was not so funny. We asked a couple of Polacks on the street the bus question for which we could get no answer, and one of them was so appalled or frightened when he heard the Russian lingo that he practically dashed away.
We decided we must divide and conquer. I went to reconnoitre the bus park to see if I could spot the bus, whilst Olga, having clocked a small group of people huddled against the wind behind the back of the bus station, went to ask the dreaded question.
My mission was unsuccessful (isn’t it always!), but on my return I found that the group that Olga had approached were waiting (note that word ‘waiting’ again) for the same bus as us. Like us, they had little or no information to go on, but thought that the bus would depart close to where we were standing. The girl who Olga was talking with then added, in a low whisper, “It’s probably better if they (‘they’ meaning the Polacks) don’t hear you talking in Russian.” Well, now, this was what I call information! And it seemed to improve my Russian no end, because, having been warned to the contrary, Russian words and phrases were flying out of my mouth like economic migrants spilling from small crammed boats across the length and breadth of Dover’s shores.
Therefore, it was probably fortuitous that, struggling to contain my new-found language skills, my eye alighted on a bus hidden away at the side of the road. There was no bus bay and no other way of knowing whether this was our bus or not, but working on the hunch that it wasn’t speaking Russian, we decided to investigate. And hey presto, Fanny’s your aunt and Bob’s your unfriendly Polack, was I right or was I right!? (for once!).**
** In September 2023, I discovered a piece of paper taped to the wall on the inside of Gdansk dole office, sorry I mean bus station, stating the bay number from which the bus leaves for Kaliningrad. Then it was bay 11. Bay 11 is not really a bay as such but a number painted on a piece of tin stuck on the corner of the bus station. Although the destination from bay 11 is a place or a town in Poland, as stated on the piece of tin, and Kaliningrad is not mentioned, three people have since corroborated that this was the bay they used to travel by bus to Kaliningrad. The best way of locating this ‘bay’ is not to ask at Information, as they’ll either grunt or will not tell you. Exiting from the front of the station, with the railway lines in front of you, hang a hard left and then left again, and walla! ~ bay 11!
Relieved that we had discovered our transport out of Poland, I was less excited by the fact that our chariot of deliverance was a minibus, even less so when the answer to the question ‘Where do we stow our heavy bags?’ was in the Skibox clipped to the back of the bus. Though the driver made the mistake of lifting our heavy cases into the Skibox for us, he never made the same mistake twice, neither at the border crossing or later when he put us down in Kaliningrad. And who can really blame him?
The cases did have to come out again when we arrived at the Russian border, and, naturally, we had to go through the same rigmarole of standing in front of poker-faced officers sitting in little square cubicles, but that inquisition apart the process though tiring was fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, we would have to endure another hour of waiting when some woman was detained either because she had the wrong travel documents, the wrong items in her luggage or who can say what else was wrong with her? But something was not quite right.
Finally, back on home territory, all we had to do now was lug the cases into a waiting taxi and from the boot of the taxi into the house.
The return journey, which had begun at 4am British time, ended in Kaliningrad at 12 midnight. Ahh, back to a nice warm house, which no doubt it would have been if the fuse box had not tripped out owing to some electrical fault or other.
In conclusion, the Kaliningrad to UK or UK to Kaliningrad route via Gdansk Airport and by bus is not as direct as one would like. However, it gets you there in the end and on the way tests personal virtues, such as patience, diplomacy, tact, resourcefulness, stamina and so forth. Yet, those of a nervous disposition are advised to approach it with caution. Prepare yourself for the journey. Perhaps an hour of meditation and a course on anger management before you leave the house?
The Baucenter: If you don’t find it there, you won’t find it anywhere!
4 January 2024 ~ Baucenter Kaliningrad DIY Store With So Much More
I wouldn’t like to give the wrong impression, the wrong impression being that beer plays a disproportionate part in helping me to decide the topics of my blog posts. (Perish the thought, old chap.) Take this post, for example, is it about a pub, is it about a bar, is it about a bottle? No, this post is about a shop, a very large shop, which in Kaliningrad ~ where tradesmen are few and far between, and where, it would seem, the majority consider themselves DIY experts, which, without putting too fine a point on it, they most certainly are not ~ is a veritable institution.
The shop in question is a humongous retail store known as the Baucenter. According to one of my brothers, “It’s bloody handsome. It sells everything!” Admittedly, and you’ve probably spotted this yourselves, some hyperbole is creeping in here. For example, it doesn’t, in case you are wondering, sell beer (shame!), but it does sell everything anyone could wish for if you are into Do It Yourself.
I’m not ~ not, that is, into Do It Yourself. I am rather more into SDIFM (Someone Doing It For Me), but as tradesmen are few and far between (Have you ever experienced déjà vu?), it is still incumbent on one to purchase whatever materials and tools are required for someone to do the job for you.
Baucenter Kaliningrad
The Baucenter (I believe there are three in Kaliningrad. I told you DIY is big business here.) is not close to us, but I kinda like the bus trip, as it enables me to contemplate the various bars on route, purely, you understand, as each of them contain the sorts of things that I like, such as chairs, lights, windows etc. The Baucenter has all of these and a whole lot more besides, and although the store is vast, it is well laid out ~ everything in numbered isles ~ and the stock so well displayed that once you’ve got your bearings and have passed your navigation exam, off you go with your basket, feeling rather smug if you know exactly where you are going and in the event that you don’t, as enthralled as any explorer can be.
The Baucenter advertises itself as ‘everything for construction, renovation and garden’.
“You don’t say!”
“I do!”
Jewson may think it’s ‘got the Jewson lot’, but the Baucenter’s got more, by a long chalk.
“Excuse me, I wonder if you can help me?”
“I shouldn’t think so for one minute. You look as if you are beyond help.”
“I’m looking for a long chalk.”
“Ah, I see, that will be Isle number 69.”
There, what did I tell you: They’ve got the Baucenter lot!
Tools, light bulbs, wallpaper, paint, screws, nuts, bolts, carpets, curtains, toilets, patio surfacing, garden ornaments, garden tools, garden fences, garden everything, stuff you need to build barbecues with, stuff you need when constructing saunas, doors to put in door holes and the frames to go round the holes and doors, lamps ~ tall, short, squat, long, silly and not-so-silly … as long as the name’s not beer, you name it, they’ve got it! Or let me put it another way, you would not want to be tasked with making an inventory of this store!
Excuse me, do you sell toilets?Don’t forget to wash your hands!
One thing that has emerged from my brief list, which causes me more problems than anything else whenever I go hardware shopping, is not that the Baucenter doesn’t sell beer, but that it does sell light bulbs, which is good if you want a light bulb. However, I am old enough to remember the time when all you needed to know about buying a light bulb was the wattage of the bulb. Nowadays, there are so many different kinds of bulbs, such a vast array of different shapes, styles and energy types ~ traditional filament, energy saving, LED ~ and new units of energy measurement that it is all too easy to be lulled into a sense of false security and then end up in the lighting isle looking perplexed and bamboozled. Watts! Lumens! BT! Bugger! Yet fear not thee who feel flummoxed! A helpful Baucenter assistant is never too far away when you need to be helped and assisted.
Now that you have replaced the lightbulb that you brought to the centre for comparison with several assorted bulbs, no one the same as the other, and your shopping basket is burgeoning, it’s time to take care of your tum. No trip to the Baucenter could ever be called complete without stopping off at its excellent café for a bite to eat and drink. Did I say drink? Yes, as in cups of tea and coffee, or maybe fruit juice or a glass of still water. What do you think I meant?
The Baucenter café is a proper café, as in an honest to goodness cafeteria. It ‘aint fancy, nor does it need to be. With their tools a-swinging in their Baucenter bags, Do It Yourself kind of people want no-nonsense up-front nourishment, and they want it for the knock-down price of a packet of ordinary paintbrushes!
After the repast is over, novices like me are inducted into DIY, the first lesson being to collect the used crocks from the table and walk them to the tray cart on the opposite side of the room.
That’s easily done, unless you are raving drunk, and of course you’d never be that whilst shopping in the Baucenter, because the Baucenter has security guards with jackets saying ‘Baucenter’ on them.
More difficult than used crocks and Baucenter security men is being vegetarian whilst being in Kaliningrad. However, wherever I go to eat, I invariably manage to find beer something minus meat, and the Baucenter café is no exception. The last time I went there, I had some tasty salads, mashed potatoes, two different kinds of cakes for desert and a large cup of coffee. It did not cost me much, under a tenner in fact, and the quality-to-price ratio left me rather chuffed.
As logical as day follows night, toilets have their respective place in the consumption and ingestion chain and suffice it to say that the Baucenter has them. They are handy for, but not limited to, hardware hauling handymen and anyone else taken short or acting in a pre-planned way before embarking on the long journey home. Hey, don’t forget your DIY sack!
Do we have to fit our own cubicle?
I am not a great fan of shopping, but like a lot of things I’m not crazy about, I do it. I am no fan of DIY and cannot imagine how anyone can be: ‘Horses for courses’, as they say. But when I’m not beerlay (that’s the phonetic spelling of Russian for poor, just in case you were wondering), an afternoon at the Beercenter, I mean Baucenter, is as good a place bar none to spend a pleasant afternoon and in the process walk away, having first paid, of course (remember those men in their Baucenter jackets!), with everything you could possibly need to complete that job in hand. Now, where did I put that bottle opener?
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30 November 2023 ~ Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
The last man to leave the sinking ship; the last man to go to the Isle of Man before they change the name to the Isle of Person; the last man to be the fourth man, as you know there was a third; the last man out at the wickets; the last man to be allowed to be called a man; the last man to play the white man; the last man behind the penultimate man; the last man ~ real man~ to win the lottery; the last man on Earth; the last man in Islington (even more rare than the last man on Earth) ~ you probably wanted to be, if not all of these, at least one of them, in the same way that I had led myself to believe that I was and would be the last man without a mobile phone. I didn’t plan things to be that way, neither did I design my phoneless status, as rumour has it, according to some highfalutin principal. It just happened. I never had a mobile phone, because I never had a mobile phone.
As with being a vegetarian (I became one of those in the 1970s.), I discovered, and I must confess with some delight, that not possessing a mobile phone became other people’s problem not mine, but when those around me who were most effected by my not possessing a mobile phone began to turn up the morality and invoke the strains of guilt, viz that my not having a mobile phone did not prevent me from using theirs, I had to agree, they did have a point.
There cannot be many of us who do not realise that the mobile phone (and I use this term generically to also include the smartphone) is, as with every other technological communication system, a tool for mass surveillance. Whenever you use a smartphone, they know where you are, what you are doing, what you are saying, and, once they have compiled that electronic dossier on you, you can bet your life they presume to know what is on your mind, even how it works, if indeed, it does work after you have enlisted yourself into the ranks of the twiddling masses. So, there it is, the smartphone, but for whom is the smartphone smart? ‘The Spy in Your Pocket’ my brother calls it.
Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
Mass surveillance is the price we pay for our addiction to technology. Some of us rail against it; some of us accept it; most of us ignore it. I, personally, am not so much bothered about Big Brother as ending my life as the Lone Ranger to become one of the twiddling cattle-driven.
Not having a smartarsephone is a little like not being saddled with children. Without both, you can sit back at comfort’s distance and watch with a heartfelt sigh of relief as it passes you by. But as Nature and habitualisation dupes us into doing things that others think we ought to do, so William Gates and his band of silicons coerce and cajole us, hunt us out, hound us down and round us up until, with no place left to hide, the last stop is the twiddler zone. Remember, just because your paranoid does not mean that they’re not out to get you!
Whilst having children is not so much of a stigma as a life sentence, having a mobile phone is incalculably stigmatic. As soon as you pull out that phone and twiddle, an arrow seems to flash out of the ether, pointing the caption at you, “One of the brainwashed masses!” Tell me, in some American states is it still a felony not to guzzle alcohol inside of a brown paper bag? Taking this as my cue, I was thinking of disguising my phone as a sandwich or rubber duck, but that would never do, because twiddlers who twiddle their lives away do so as if by self-enslavement, they are wearing a badge of honour. All for one and look like all! WTF! (The World Twiddling Forum).
It astonishes me how inveterate twiddlers, who twiddle whilst they walk, do not meet with a horrible accident. An acquaintance of mine, an elderly gentleman, has seen fit to turn this banal practice into a source of entertainment.
Whenever a pedestrianised twiddler is heading in his direction deaf and blind to all around them, he takes up position on the pavement, having first worked out their approximate trajectory, and stands there whilst they collide with him. Judging by the average response, it would seem that even the demigod smartphone, with all its apps, bells and whistles, is powerless to resist when it comes to timely embarrassment.
My personal favourites of the twiddling fraternity are pub twiddling couples. I have seen couples come into pubs twiddling, buy drinks whilst twiddling and then spend the entire evening sitting next to each other, never saying a word, just twiddling. Are they beyond repair, or do they actually ‘talk to each other’, for example on the WhatsArse messaging system?
“What an interesting evening, darling. Time to twiddle back home.”
You’ve probably guessed by now where all this is leading. Correct, no matter how much I might rail against it, and in the process vainly hope that somehow, somewhere along the way, I will exonerate myself, the indisputable fact remains that crumpling under umpteen pressures, I eventually succumbed. Yes, I went out and bought a twiddler (‘Arrrggghhh!’)
So, whatever could have gone wrong to have brought about this extraordinary U-turn?
For all its social and psychological evils, whilst it irrefutably is an implement for mass surveillance, the smartphone also doubles as a cloak of invisibility.
Before the smartphone and its mass uptake, going to the pub on one’s tod was a peculiar exercise in self-consciousness. If you hadn’t got a newspaper to hide behind, and even if you had you might end up reading it cover to cover, upside down and back to front, all you could do was to stare into space. Thankfully, the days have gone, except in some up-North benefit-class clubs, previously ‘working man’s’, when a knuckle-dragging neanderthal clocking how you were sitting there with seemingly nothing better to do than letch would adopt a confrontational tone: “Are you looking at my girlfriend?” which obviously you were, or, if he hadn’t got a girlfriend, which usually he hadn’t because he was far too stupid to have such a thing: “Are you looking at me mate?” The temptation to reply, “Given any number of variables, I would rather look at a piece of s_ _t!” was often too hard to resist, even though as a means of closure, it often ended in fisticuffs and sometimes a trip to the local nick.
Today, pubs, in the main, are much more civilised. Possibly because they are more food, and therefore family, orientated, and also because some of the ‘men’ who frequent them would be positively miffed if they didn’t catch you looking at them. You can usually tell who these men are. You’ve seen them on the adverts. They’re always winning the lottery.
How many men have stopped doing the lottery since adverts like that appeared is a question for another day. It does not alter the fact that sat there in the boozer looking like Billy No Mates, constantly checking your watch, as if someone you had arranged to meet is late, or coddling the delusion that after you have finished that long, that slow, that lonely pint you are going on somewhere else, are no longer ruses you have to resort to in an age where everyone looks and acts as if they are everyone else.
Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
As long as you are a paid-up member of the Zombified Smartphone Club, nobody is going to bother you, nobody is going to question you. With that little (not so little and also rather heavy) rectangular glass-front phone, a voyeur’s window on the world, not so different from Pandora’s Box, flings itself open to you. You can kerb-crawl the net at will, take as many selfies as you like ~ hundreds if it floats your boat ~ before seizing on that magic one that looks not remotely like you. As long as it hides those sags and wrinkles and makes you believe you look 20 years younger (Likes and Followers! Likes and Followers!), you’ll kiss the ass of your mobile phone until all the old cows come home. Ahh, shrine to delusion, vanity, narcissism, thy name is social media!
I instinctively knew that to take a selfie of myself was something I should avoid. And was I ever right. But for the sake of historical record, I took that selfie. Good heavens, I thought, when I looked at my selfie, what on earth do I think I’m doing wearing the nose of Charles de Gaulle?
This first sorte into the realm of selfie-taking taught me in no uncertain terms that there is obviously more than meets the eye (and nose) when it comes to taking fawning photos for mass consumption on Facebook, especially abracadabra ones that transform you from what you really are into the oil painting you never can be. Indeed, every photo on Facebook is intrinsically an art form, art meaning ‘artificial’, and not everyone can master it. The trick (and what a trick!) is to make your faithful believe that the life your photos say you are living is primarily better than theirs and certainly better than yours.
Look out! Selfie in Victory Square!
My next trick was to put the smartfun away, cease repeating “He nose you know!” and shoot off on my solo run into Kaliningrad’s city centre, where, it embarrasses me to confess, that in front of the monument in Victory Square the compulsion took me again. I had to try for another selfie! (You can see the way it goes, can’t you?)
This time I would bring into play the much loved sucked-in cheeks and ubiquitous silly pout. At the very last minute, however, drawn in cheeks were dropped (they tend to do that, don’t they?), as I had noted in my dotage that my impression of Peter Cushing was already quite advanced and that to remodel my cheeks into two squeezed lemons might prove a bridge too far. If only I’d have stuck in my youth to murdering animals and eating them, by now my cheeks would be lovely and round like two plump rolls of prime pink brisket!
Even though my lips had not been enhanced, pumped up so that they looked like slugs, and I had no Frankenstein’s bolt through my snout, which given its size on my debut selfie could easily have accommodated any number of scrapyard pieces, this was destined to be my first (and also my last, I might add) outdoor-taken selfie. All that I succeeded in doing by pouting my lips like a retard was to convey the regrettable impression that although I was out on the town tonight my false teeth had not come with me. They were probably still in the gherkin jar into which they had landed when I let out that sneeze.
“Well, bugger that!” I said to myself, and shoved my Toosmart phone deep within my inside pocket, and I did not take it out again until I was standing outside the bar to which my feet had been programmed to take me. (Blame it all on the technocrats!)
Here are some facts for you. There are two bar/restaurants in the centre of Kaliningrad which are joined at the hip: one is Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka. The only pubs in the UK I know which had a similar arrangement, occurred in London’s Greenwich. They were the Richard I and The Greenwich Union (since vandalised by Young’s Brewery, which, with typical corporate disregard for social history and heritage, knocked them into one).
How embarrassing it was that on one occasion when a group of us had gone to the Richard I, I somehow ended up halfway through the evening accidentally in The Greenwich Union. I had stepped outside the front of the Richard for a quick puff (that’s right, I said ‘puff’!) on my King Edward cigar and when I went to return inside unknowingly entered The Union. Thinking I was in the Richard and that my friends were playing a silly joke, ie they had gone into hiding somewhere, I took the pint I had freshly ordered and went and sat in the beer garden to ponder on what I should do. It was only when I heard my friends chatting away behind the fence in the Richard garden next door that I realised my folly: it wasn’t my friends who had played a joke; it was beer and navigation!
“Well, that’s nothing to be proud of. Is it!” Hmm, I’ll have to think about that one.
Out of the two Kaliningrad bars mentioned, my first bar tonight would be the Bavarian one, an establishment where, if you are lucky, you get to sit down the centre of the room inside a make-believe beer barrel. Unfortunately, my luck was out this evening ~ it had probably gone to Maxims ~ and I was shown to a line of seats and tables that ran along the perimeter of the room. Good! A young couple sitting together at right angles to my table would provide the perfect opportunity for testing the cloaking function of that recently purchased gadget that was jumping out of my pocket.
A businessman, to the left of me, who had obviously not just bought his phone, was so absolutely invisible to everyone in his orbit, with the exception of himself, that had his skills at twiddling not been so well endowed (which seemed to beg the question, was he born with his smartarse in his hand?), I would never have thought to notice him.
He was a pro, I was a novice, and I have to say it showed. My first message on WhatsArse was an all fingers and thumbs job. It took me 20 minutes to compose a reasonably legible paragraph which, had I been working on a laptop, would have taken perhaps a minute or less. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns, and over the next 40 minutes, managed to shoot three messages into and across cyberspace complete with photos attached. During those 40 minutes, the young couple facing my profile (and thinking “It’s Peter Cushing!”), and whatever it was the man was doing down the other end of the room with his Bavarian sausage, were so plainly indistinct as to issue the suspicion that I had come as close to vanished as Davos had to resetting the world. Had I been any more gone, I would have been shaking hands with H.G. Wells!
Next door, in the Czech bar, I was again unlucky. The best seats had been taken, and I ended up perched upon a sponge-filled leather-look bench, which was, I suppose, alrightish, except that being so high off the ground it left one’s little legs dangling with nothing to rest one’s feet on, rather like sitting in the barber’s chair when you were six-years old. How fortuitous and kind of fate that she had arranged a stool in front of me so that I could use its stretcher as a foot rest.
In this bar, I tried out my phone with an email or two. Fine, although when it came to attaching images, the process became a tad mysterious. Exit quickly and onto Google. I had never opened websites using a smartarsephone before, and now that I have, I cannot say that I found the experience particularly positive: yards and yards of constant scrolling. It’s like an electronic version of bog roll. But twiddling and swiping go hand in glove, and for me, the man with the reputation for being the Last Man on Earth to Own a Smartphone, the gauntlet had been thrown.
In the bar up in the clouds (the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery) overlooking the spot where I shouldn’t have taken my second selfie, and now on my third beer, not only had I become more confident in my twiddling and more comfortable with my twiddler, but my Russian language had improved no end. Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo (“Good Moaning”) may well have had good reason to feel proud of me, but could his approval be half as rewarding as thinking you’re getting it right, whilst most likely you are not, or rather not quite, but not knowing nor either caring because sitting snuggly in your pocket, if you haven’t already lost it, is your little spy and pie in the sky, your customised, very own smartphone ~ ahhhh.
By the end of the evening I was able to say two things. No, I had not drunk so much that I could only say two things, I mean two things pertinent to my smartphone experience. The first was something I had always suspected: Never take a selfie and, if you have to think again, never take a selfie. The second was that my expectations of the smartphone as an instrument of lonely-guy concealment when sitting alone in a bar or pub was vindicated. And yet, the keeping-tracks-on-you downside that inevitably comes with owning a smartphone, unless you keep it switched off, continues not to sit easily with me.
In more recent years, I have heard people say that the Silicon Valley Mob have turned up the heat in their racket to enslave people and to extort as much personal information about everyone on Earth as completely as they can. Like the Capone organisation, which, after Al’s demise, moved with the help of Sam Giancana into the labour rackets, the Silicon Outfit found a new racket in 2-step verification.
Conspiracy theory or not, with the roll-out of 2-step verification for online banking, as a sign-in function for websites and blogs and as the only option for identifying yourself on ecommerce sites, such as eBay for example, the message is loud and clear, either get a smartphone or else be bolloxed.
The one-step further exploitation than 2-step verification is fingerprint and/or eye recognition. Now it’s getting personal. Where will it all end? The clue may lie in the word ‘end’. In other words and words more plain, is Anus Authentication already passing from science fiction into the realms of science fact? It is too much of a coincidence that AI (Anal Intelligence) is the state of the art abbreviation on the tongue of every news editor. AI is everywhere, so there must be something in it, as I’m sure there must be someone out there, in a small secluded brick-looking building in Silicon Valley’s back yard, who is poised with the paperwork in his hand for the biggest breakthrough yet. Zappa may have the answer …
Image attributions
Man with phone on couch: Image by <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/character-playing-videogame_7734013.htm/#query=clipart sitting using a smartphone&position=17&from_view=search&track=ais&uuid=00c57546-c79e-4db8-a98c-c064c40ce15e”">Freepik</a>
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